BRING YOUR CHAMPIONS, THEY'RE OUR MEAT

It took all season, but Northwestern finally encountered a team more practiced in the art of the fourth-quarter fade. Michigan State and Northwestern played a fraught battle, with both teams desperately keeping the jaws of victory at bay until finally the Spartans gave into their self-destructive tendencies and allowed Northwestern to hang on for their eighth win of the season.

The Wildcats won the Heston Bowl to determine which fanbase would
end up walking out of the stadium cackling with demented incredulity

Ibrahim Campbell had a phenomenal game, as he was seemingly around every big play on defense. Freshman Superback Dan Vitale rumbled around, over, and through hapless defenders. Michigan State had the opportunity to tie, but came up short. I can't imagine that most State fans even flinched. Their team has lost every possible break, been victimized by every questionable call (including a generous pass interference that helped the 'Cats seal the game), and watched week in and week out as the lead has slipped from their grasp. Now, they have to go to Minnesota to try to qualify for some bowl that no one wants to go to. To call the Spartans snake-bitten at this point is a gross understatement; their football team has been bitten, swallowed, and partially digested by the type of snake that stalks Ice Cube or battles a fake-looking computer generated octopus for what we can assume is some reason.

Meanwhile, the Wildcats turn to a far graver matter than tying their best record of Pat Fitzgerald's tenure and improving their bowl position. The Illini are coming bearing the Hat and now is the time to demand its return to rightful place on all of our metaphorical heads.

HAT WEEK IS UPON US

When Tim Beckman took the job at Illinois, he made a point to stoke the flames of college football's least intense rivalry. "You'll never see me wearing purple," Beckman said, throttling a plush Willie the Wildcat doll. He claimed that he would only refer to Northwestern as "that school up north," baffling his players who gathered and brainstormed dozens of Big Ten, MAC, FCS, and Canadian schools before remembering that Northwestern existed. With the exception of the time that Northwestern lost more than thirty conesecutive games and cemented its place as the worst major-conference program in the history of college football and then the fans tore down the goalposts in mock celebration, Tim Beckman's War on Northwestern is the funniest thing that has ever happened to Northwestern football.

I have no idea how to react to Beckman. Apparently no one told him how the Big Ten works. Teams generally deign to play Northwestern and assume an automatic win. Most fans condescendingly cheer for the Wildcats in good years like you would for a toddler that has managed to successfully remain quiet for upwards of 15 minutes. Northwestern has been more good than bad for the past dozen years, but no team other than the conference's most wretched programs expects to lose to them. Every October road game is Homecoming, as Northwestern is inevitably trotted out like a Carl Denham ape show for win-starved alumni.

Denham expected to make millions with his best-selling Broadway revue
entitled "Take a Look at This Gigantic Ape, People"

Do any Illini fans actually care about beating Northwestern more than Michigan or Ohio State or Wisconsin? Do any Illini fans sit around talking about their program's big wins over Northwestern? Will any Illini fan take any solace in a win on Saturday to salvage their miserable season because it was against the Wildcats and not Indiana or Purdue or Minnesota? Would any deranged Illini fan attempt to destroy The Rock with rock poison and then call into a Big Ten radio show to confess to his deeds because he is so inflamed with hatred for Northwestern and also using football as an outlet to explore the darkest realms of his psyche?

GIVE US OUR HAT BACK, BECK MAN

Despite the Illini's rather disastrous attempts at playing Big Ten football, Pat Fitzgerald is not taking the game lightly. Do you think that Fitz mentioned throwing records out for the rivalry game? “You can throw the records out,” Fitzgerald said to the surprise of no one. “You can throw everything out when you get into rivalry games." He then unleashed a fleet of dump trucks that carted off every desk, chair, Bednarik trophy, paperclip, and inspirational fist-pumping manual from the Athletic Office and began attempting to locate the nearest cliff.

This space reserved for hat

For those of you not up on your American history, the hat trophy comes from an obscure American hat enthusiast named Abraham Lincoln, whose life is finally being brought to the attention of the American people through a major motion picture. Lincoln, who won the presidency based on his length, wingspan, and executive upside, battled a brief period of unpopularity in the South. The Hat is the third iteration of the Northwestern-Illinois rivalry trophy, and the first that has to do with presidential rather than stereotypical Native American iconography. It is a good thing that Lincoln came from Illinois and not some shitty president. Imagine if the two programs battled for Chester A. Arthur's muttonchops, William Henry Harrison's overcoat, or Franklin Pierce's bo staff.

Pierce defeated Winfield Scott in the 1852 presidential election, somehow pulling together a
campaign that was able to beat a man nicknamed "Old Fuss and Feathers." Pierce's campaign
team put together the winning slogan "We pierced you in 1848, we shall Pierce you in 1852"
because nineteenth-century voters In 1856, Congress abolished the Giant Bird Race as a cornerstone
of national election campaigns.

Beckman faces a tough test in his rookie Hat Week. Pat Fitzgerald has had several years to hone his inspirational Lincoln quotes and to pace the locker room in full nineteenth-century regalia to fire up the 'Cats. Beckman may find Ron Zook's fake beard in a utility closet. I am, of course, assuming that both football coaches conduct their pre-game rituals while dressed as Abraham Lincoln, because otherwise what is the point? I normally don't condone fan movements to fire a coach, but if Beckman is not taunting the Wildcat sideline by wearing a novelty stovepipe hat for the duration of the game, he deserves to have someone register firehatlesstimebeckman.com, because that is unforgivable.

Meanwhile, in Evanston, this game is about more than just a hat: it is about revenge. The Illini ran over the Wildcats in Wrigley Field. Then, last year, vowel-hoarding quarterback Nathan Scheelhaase and receiver A.J. Jenkins lit up the Northwestern secondary en route to a gut-wrenching comeback win. After beating Indiana, they then lost every single game on their schedule except for the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl. The Hat has not been in Evanston for two long years, years that Pat Fitzgerald has spent plotting an elaborate scheme of revenge so complex and diabolical that it defies description-- it involves look-alikes, the heir to the throne of Monaco, a carriage swap on the banks of the Elba, and an elaborate cipher that can be solved only by manipulating a suit of armor at the Art Institute to mimic a fist-pump, but largely it involves scoring at least one more point than the fighting Illini in Saturday's football game.

CLOSING THE SEASON

I began the season with modest expectations. Instead, the Wildcats are 8-3, poised to go to a bowl game, and arguably something like nine combined minutes from an undefeated season and a berth in the Big Ten Championship game. Though the losses have been the result of disappointing come-backs, the Wildcats have been good enough to win every game on their schedule. This season has seen the return of the running game led by Venric Mark and Kain Colter, and defensive standouts Chi Chi Ariguzo, Ibrahim Campbell, Tyler Scott, and David Nwabusie.

There is still one thing missing, though, and that is The Hat. Each win has been gratifying this season, but none has come with a ridiculous trophy and bragging rights in a comically tepid rivalry. Nothing is more gratifying than an Illini coach who seems determined to imbue this rivalry with an actual amount of football hate and so BYCTOM salutes you, Tim Beckman, for burning your purple clothes with the zeal of Professor Plum hastily destroying the evidence, for denigrating Northwestern by replacing its name with a ludicrous directional euphemism, for hanging a"No Northwestern" sign in the Illini locker room, for desperately trying to make something out of this game other than a precious hat mounted to a base. And in the spirit of this renewed rivalry, I hope the Wildcats run the Illini out of the stadium and down I-57, with no win, no hat, and embittered to demand vengeance for next year and for all eternity.

It's nearly 2013, which means that Northwestern fans have an opportunity to recover from their New Years' revels, roll out of bed, scrape the vomit from their hair and clothing and extremities, and watch the Wildcats take on Mississippi State in the Taxslayer.com Gator Bowl.

This year's postseason had less intrigue than other mid-tier bowl selections. This is a shame, because I really enjoy baselessly speculating about the machinations of bowl executives planning the football team's fate in a walnut-lined state room where national bowl representatives and corporate sponsors meet to wheel, deal, and bet on brutal animal-baiting tournaments away from the prying eyes of polite society.

Bowl officials take a break after a grueling morning filibuster from the Beef
O'Brady's people before a leisurely afternoon picking the Belk Bowl matchups
and then hunting the ultimate prey: man

Every year, someone will mock the proliferation of crappy bowl games, bemoaning their necessity, mocking their increasingly ridiculous corporate affiliations, and deriding them as all but meaningless in the standings. These are ridiculous accusations. Bowl games are more college football and allow you to turn on your television at 4:30 on a weekday and be pleasantly surprised by a game that usually includes one potential Future Big Ten team. Corporate names will serve as a useful footnote in history books that want to explain how a goofy-looking puppet served as the business plan of several late-90s internet enterprises that were rich enough to purchase naming rights to a crappy bowl game. And no fan base in the history of crappy, also-ran bowl games wants to win the Gator Bowl this year as much as fans of Northwestern.

The 2012 football season has seen the Big Ten devolve into a joke, its best team undone by the promise of free tattoos, its reverse Manifest Destiny expansion eastwards into an ever-bigger Ten, its school-grabbing setting off another wave of conference realignment. None of this matters to Northwestern, losers of nine bowl games since 1949. While this season has been a pleasant surprise, a bowl win could topple the last barrier standing between Northwestern's awful football history and current football decentness.

NOW WE HAVE A TOP HAT HO HO HO

The last game of the 2012 season was more than an intrastate struggle between a surging Northwestern team and an Illini team down on its luck. It was a reckoning. The Illini had been in possession of the Hat for two unbearable years. Northwestern fans suffering from a nervous disorder commonly referred to as "hat fever" screamed about hats in their sleep, removed all hats from orange-wearing persons in their vicinity, and even constructed crude hats out of paper in order to cope.

Those affected with hat fever may take solace in scholarly Lincoln research or by
covering their walls in homemade Lincoln paraphernalia, such as the Lincoln
constructed by University President Morton Schapiro

In the first half, the Illini startled the Wildcats by moving the ball with ease. It seemed as though Tim Beckman's anti-Northwestern saber-rattling had lit a fire under them, and that is not a mixed metaphor because I am implying that the saber could be rattled against a stone, creating a spark that could ignite some kindling beneath the Illinois players, which is a very common motivational tactic at the highest levels of competitive football. Northwestern fans braced for another harrowing game coming down to the final seconds.

That did not happen. The game got out of hand in the second half. Illini drives stalled and extended Northwestern possessions with penalties, including two on Coach Beckman himself for sideline interference. The video of one of the penalties involved the official chasing the play along the sideline, running over Beckman, and, without a moment's hesitation, throwing a flag down on his prone body to add insult to injury. That may not even be the strangest Beckman sideline moment this season; he was reprimanded by the NCAA earlier for surreptitiously dippin'. I don't blame Beckman for that. College football coaching is a stressful job, and coaches should be free able to use all of the smokes, chaw, snuff, and opium products they desire during the course of a football game besides their traditional recourse to ass-slapping and screaming at someone without the slightest modicum of human dignity.

No one should be allowed to get this angry without having immediate access to
chewable barbiturates or a horde of hearty fellows sworn to medieval vengeance
upon an unsavory duke

The 50-14 rout was one of the most lopsided wins in Northwestern history against a Big Ten foe. By the end, Fitzgerald seemed more concerned that all of the seniors got a chance to play, even if that meant putting Bo Cisek in at running back to achieve some measure of Ditkaness. The big win was enough to put Northwestern back into the polls at #20. More importantly, it meant that The Hat has returned to its home in Evanston, where it will hopefully remain as Beckman fumes and comes up with more ways to comically denigrate Northwestern football.

Here's something to denigrate: somebody give me the name of the person
responsible for making a hat trophy attached to a base, denying all of us in
attendance the opportunity to see various Northwestern players parading around
Ryan Field while wearing the trophy as a hat while haranguing anyone in the
Illinois football organization named Douglas

OFFICIAL BYCTOM BOWL PREVIEW

Mississippi State, like Northwestern, started the season on a tear. They began 7-0 before the realities of life in the SEC West led them into a brutal three game stretch against Alabama, LSU, and the Johnny Football Men. They managed only one more win the rest of the season, against a reeling Arkansas team in its death throes of the John L. Smith era. Nevertheless, the Bulldogs, like every Northwestern opponent in the history of Northwestern football, see the Gator Bowl as a winnable game and a way to end their season on a high note.

The Bulldogs boast two of the top cornerbacks in the country in Johnthan Banks and Darius Slay. Between the involvement of Taxslayer.com and Darius Slay, this will be the slayingest bowl game in the country, especially if Slayer can play the halftime show that consists of them acting out the dozens of crappy movies and TV episodes entitled "Slay Ride."

Slayer members have the choice to act out a T.J. Hooker episode described
on IMBD as: "Stacy realizes a couple who foiled a drug raid are a team of
robbers" or a Kojak episode with a plot summary that contains the sentence
"Discovering that a young Army wife had fallen from a roof at an earlier
convention (which they had attended) leads Kojak to her call girl sister."

Fortunately for Northwestern, the Wildcats no longer throw the ball, so Slay and Banks will be spending most of their time trying to tackle Mark or Colter. The Bulldogs do have a terrifying wide receiver in Chad Bumphis, and, while the 'Cats have shown some improvement in pass defense, they are still vulnerable to the big play. Mississippi State is less terrifying on the ground, where it averages about 140 yards per game, good for 88th in the country. Conventional wisdom would suggest that Northwestern's best chance for a victory will involve stymieing Bumphis and successfully keeping it on the ground and away from their rapacious defensive backs. But because this is Northwestern, I predict that the best way to win this game is to go out to a significant first half lead, collapse entirely in the second half, and allow the Bulldogs to get within 45 seconds of winning the game but hope that the final hail mary falls three centimeters short of Bumphis's grasp in the endzone as unconscious Wildcat fans plummet down the stairwells at EverBank field because their nervous systems can no longer bear the strain except for the fat-cat alumni who have had fainting couches installed in their private skyboxes.

AND I AIN'T GOT A DURN THING AGAINST PA

Northwestern may not be playing a bowl game in the state of Texas, but that does not make the early twentieth century reign of the Fergusons any less fascinating, as described in Randolph Campbell's Gone to Texas and James L. Haley's Passionate Nation. In 1914, an obscure banker named James E.Ferguson came, essentially, out of nowhere during the Democratic gubernatorial primary. Like many Southern states, Texas was governed by one party. The fractious Democratic Primary in most elections determined the winner of the election, and was therefore more spirited and hard-fought than the general election.

The major issue in 1914 was prohibition, and Ferguson's opponent, Thomas Ball, was an ardent prohibitionist. Ball, however, belonged to a country club that served drink, and, while he claimed he did not imbibe, his membership created a clear "I did not inhale" situation in 1914 Texas terms. Ferguson ignored prohibition and declared that he would treat any legislation for or against prohibition the same folksy way: "I will strike it where the chicken got the axe," he proclaimed, although the historical record is less clear about whether or not he hooked his thumbs into his suspenders.

Ferguson was a populist candidate, and "Farmer Jim" ran on a platform promising rent relief to tenant farmers. He was an expert at hurling invective at his opposition, mustering every Southern blowhard trick in the book to go after Ball. When President Woodrow Wilson endorsed Ball, Ferguson portrayed it as Yankee meddling, invoking the "sacred principles for which the gallant Confederate soldiers fought and bled on so many Southern battlefields," which is the rhetorical equivalent of dressing as a giant thumb and hooking yourself to a 30-foot wall-mounted suspender. He won the nomination and the general election.

Texas Governor James E. "Farmer Jim""Pa" Ferguson
grafted his hands onto state monies as effectively as
he cultivated home-spun nicknames

Ferguson's first term had some successes. He passed a bill to lower and fix tenant rents for farmers (although it was eventually ruled unconstitutional), formed a state highway commission, and passed a bill for compulsory education. Soon, he began interfering with school administration, high-handedly ousting the president of Prairie View Normal and Industrial College. Edward Blackshear had drawn the ire of Ferguson as a supporter of Ball and as an African American academic whose rise to prominence contrasted with Ferguson's virulent white supremacy. Ferguson then turned to the University of Texas. He threw his weight around, attempted to remove the president, demanded the firing of several faculty members whom he believed had crossed him, and signed an official proclamation demanding the trustees present him with their lunch money at the capitol every afternoon.

The fight with the university made him powerful enemies, who quickly latched onto allegations of corruption. Ferguson moved more than a hundred thousand dollars worth of state funds into his own private accounts and mysterious loans of dubious origin floated into his coffers. He was indicted, impeached, and convicted of fraud and embezzlement and barred from state office. But a simple conviction of fraud would not keep Ferguson out of politics.

In 1924, Miriam A. Ferguson appeared on the ballot. James Ferguson had opposed women's suffrage; now his wife ran for governor with the thinly-veiled understanding that newly-dubbed "Ma" Ferguson came as a package with "Pa." Running under the slogan "Me for Ma, and I ain't got a durn thing against Pa," the Fergusons swept back into power on a platform opposing the rising influence of the Ku Klux Klan. Miriam Ferguson became the first woman elected as a state governor, but "Pa" clearly pulled the strings. The impeachment and conviction had not slowed down Fergusons' gleeful corruption; they began selling pardons to anyone willing to pay the vastly inflated price of Ferguson livestock and meted out state contracts to those willing to pay for expensive advertising space in their newspaper.

The Fergusons on the campaign trail striking a blow for equal rights
for women in terms of graft and state-wide corruption

A reformer swept out the Fergusons in the next term, but they reappeared during the Depression. Ma Ferguson returned to Austin in 1932, just in time for them to control the distribution of New Deal federal relief funds. The Fergusons throughout remained dedicated to their principles of lining their pockets, attacking people with pointed folksiness, and, disparaging academics as "mutton headed."

LET US FINALLY WIN A BOWL GAME FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING

The Wildcats have had a surprisingly successful season mixed with gut-wrenching disappointment and ulcer-forming excitement. These are also ways to describe Northwestern's bowl appearances, as they have continued to come up just short for several frustrating years. This year, the 'Cats seem primed for another close game against an evenly-matched squad. They will almost certainly try to kill you, me, and our friends and loved ones because that is how Northwestern plays football this year except against Illinois and FCS teams. There's nothing more to be written that has not already been written or personified in plush monkey toy form about the unfortunate bowl victory drought of more than 60 years. Many fans may not care whether or not their team wins their crappy bowl game. I intend to celebrate the only way I know how: by renting a gigantic alligator costume with a GATOR BOWL CHAMPION sash and crown and proclaim myself King of the Alligators on the steps of City Hall.

Sometimes, you win football games. Sometimes, you lose football games. And sometimes, you eradicate a bowl drought nearly old enough to qualify for social security by jubilantly tearing a stuffed monkey asunder in a locker room and then bringing its severed head to a press conference because Northwestern finally won a damn bowl game.

Not too many coaches deliver a sincere address about the hard work and tenacity of their football
players with the remains of a monkey toy sitting on the table like the head of Alfredo Garcia

With the victory, Northwestern's seniors became the school's winningest class, the Wildcats claimed their third season with 10 victories, and Coach Fitz won his fiftieth game, more than any other head coach. Emotions flew high after the win. Fitz broke down; even his rote "our young men" speeches went from banal, rote coach-speak to inspiring rote coach-speak as you can hear the weight of Northwestern's abysmal football history lifted off of his shoulders.

THE HISTORY OF NORTHWESTERN BOWL LOSSES

The burden of history continued to weigh on Northwestern football fans with each passing year. For much of the drought, bowls were relatively few and far between, and Northwestern lost most of their games anyway. The 1949 Rose Bowl seemed impossibly distant. The last time Northwestern won a bowl game, Harry Truman demanded satisfaction from Hirohito in a musket duel and the United States was a breakaway dukedom in the Holy Roman Empire.

Harrold of Truman, Archduke of Missouri, Pomerania, and
Lower Silesia, undermined a strategic marriage of his
arch-rival Dewey into a powerful Canadian Habsburgh family
by revealing Dewey's ungainly way with the tea service. He
then posed for a portrait with an announcement prematurely
announcing Dewey's ruined nuptials filled with those f-looking
s letters and then Northwestern won a bowl game

For a long time, Northwestern fans had been content merely to make it to the postseason, but the bowl losses had begun to pile up into an astounding collection of happenings. From the perspective of today, it almost seemed like those bowl losses happened to make yesterday's win even sweeter; that is the only way I can describe what happened in the Sun Bowl, the Outback Bowl, and the Second Alamo Bowl without the use of hostile occult forces because the Lakefill was built on some sort of ancient Mer-Man burial ground with a very specific grudge against mid-tier bowl victories.

HEY THERE WAS AN ACTUAL GAME THAT HAPPENED

The game certainly played to the complete opposite of my expectations. Northwestern's defense locked down Mississippi State's passing attack and the offense relied on timely passes to march down the field as they struggled with the Bulldog run defense. The 'Cats certainly benefited from a tough day for Mississippi State quarterback Tyler Russell, who coughed up four interceptions, including an opening pick-six into the waiting arms of Quentin Williams. He was not helped by the excellent play of the Wildcat secondary, who kept MSU's ace receiver Chad Bumphis in check with only 18 yards. On offense, Trevor Siemian came off the bench to deliver an unexpected rushing touchdown and the play of the game on an elusive third-down completion to keep a drive alive. The Bulldogs limited Colter and Mark, but Colter sealed the game with a 31-yard scramble to set up a Tyris Jones touchdown. Freshman superback Dan Vitale continued his late-season surge by leading all receivers with 82 yards. Mississippi State also helped out with several costly penalties, including a penalty for attempting to use 1.5 defenses, and another sideline interference penalty that was nowhere near as funny as the Beckman flag-clobber.

The game, though, remained in doubt. The Bulldogs battled back from an early deficit and, at times, looked like they might take over the game on the ground. When they got within a touchdown in the fourth quarter, Northwestern fans instinctively began to strap into their safety seats, put on their mittens, and have their man-servants prepare their purple-plated heart paddle machines. To their credit, Mississippi State refused to give up even after a barrage of turnovers. Fortunately, Northwestern rallied, added an insurance touchdown, and refused to budge in the final minutes, and I am just now nearly able to chew solid food.

To be honest, I did not know much about Mississippi State before the game. Northwestern fans were introduced to the Starkville tradition of constantly ringing cowbells for several consecutive hours. Far be it for me to disparage the tradition as a person who has encouraged the defense by yelling and making fist-claws. I'm also thankful that Bulldog fans don't traditionally file their collective nails on third downs, make mewling late-night alley cat noises, or endlessly holler out Snow's "Informer" off the top of their heads for the duration of the game, which would result in a muddled staccato mishmash except on the words "informer" and "licky boom boom down."

Please don't give Purdue any ideas

As someone who could not make it to Jacksonville and watched the game on television, I can only add that the only thing that would have made this historic day for Northwestern more enjoyable would be more delightful banter between the race car guy and the inflatable knight.

THE GATOR BOWL IN CONTEXT

Northwestern's win was a lone bright spot in a disappointing day for the Big Ten. Michigan and Nebraska lost close games to SEC foes, while Stanford prevailed over Wisconsin in the giant man running into each otherest game of the day. Purdue disappeared in the wilderness. The crappy Big Ten showing was certainly affected by Penn State and Ohio State's bowl bans, which led to unfavorable match-ups against unsporting athletic conferences that refused to suspend two of their top-ranked schools from bowl play out of gentlemanly honor.

Bowl season is reserved for ridiculous inter-conference opprobrium that affects rooting interests. Though Northwestern took care of business against an SEC opponent, New Year's Day brought grim tidings to the Big Ten as a whole. Michigan State was the only other Big Ten team to win a bowl game what can only be described as satisfying reverse choke that helped undo some of the heartbreak from the past season. The rest of the conference has caused a whole lot of internet consternation about the Big Ten's inferiority to other conferences, particularly by swaggering SEC partisans.

The conference argument is specious and ridiculous, born out of the inherent politicking inherent in college football's arbitrary ranking system. While the Big Ten certainly had a down year, its top teams did not seem overwhelmingly over-matched in their games. More importantly, it is impossible to calculate the strength of the ever-growing Big Ten; teams playing Big Ten opponents cannot be entirely sure that they will not somehow end the game in the Big Ten in a new division called the Lions or the Land Barons or Los Locos Kick Your Balls into Outer Space.

Scientific simulation of Conference Realignment

Nonsensical conference arguments also mean that we're supposed to support our fellow Big Ten teams in bowls, even though I have spent the last several months whipping myself into a fury of pointless sports hatred directed against their programs. No conference argument was going to deny me the hollow satisfaction of Michigan getting Roy Roundtreed or Nebraska coming up short. How am I supposed to cope with bowl season without feasting on their fans' mild disappointment?

IN CASE YOU FORGOT, NORTHWESTERN WON THE GATOR BOWL

I honestly have no idea what else to say about this happy moment in Northwestern bowl game history. I'm thrilled for Coach Fitz and the players, who turned around a season many of us thought would be a disappointment into one of the most gratifying in the history of the program. Watching Northwestern's years of impossibly heartbreaking bowl losses are a reminder that a single game is not an indictment of a team's character, but the result of the unpredictable bouncing of an oblong ball and (in my theory), the curse of a vengeful group of supernatural mermen. Even so, it is much more fun when the team wins and then parades around a stuffed monkey carcass. Happy new year, Wildcat fans. Let's all hope the basketball team does well enough to make us suffer through another Selection Sunday.

They're all gathered from 'round the globe, in their purple regalia and their academic hats and their business-casual khakis. The Northwestern faithful are huddled together at the Rebeca Crown Center waiting for the signs of a decision: black smoke means no decision has been made, purple smoke means a new coach, red smoke means they've found an occasion to use that smoke machine that the University Police seized from the raid on an off-campus Dillo Day party, and white smoke indicates an overextended, overwrought, and clumsy comparison between hiring a new basketball coach and picking a pope.

In my defense, how often do you get to make topical Pope Smoke
references? Unless we can convince Hollywood to get a lot more
secretive and ostentatious about how they choose the new host of
Family Feud.

Bill Carmody, who served for thirteen years as the head coach of Northwestern, was fired after a depleted, injury-riddled squad did what every single Northwestern did in the history of the program and missed the NCAA tournament. For thirteen years, Carmody's teams have tormented Big Ten opponents with barrages of three pointers, backdoor layups, and relentless Balkan trashtalk. Now, the 'Cats will have to find a new identity that will hopefully lead them to the promised land, when the name "Northwestern" appears on Selection Sunday without that ugly, disappointing State appendage-- I'm convinced that Northwestern State University is a guy with a telephone in an empty office in Natchitoches, Louisiana that finds a dozen dudes to put into the tournament as an ongoing prank on Northwestern's futile morass of basketball ineptitude.

THE BILL CARMODY ERA

It has been so long between BYCTOM posts that there is an unpublished draft pondering whether or not to fire Carmody. And I had come down on it as a mistake. This has nothing to do with basketball and everything to do with a concern about unbalancing the humors in Northwestern's coaching. Bill Carmody served as a crucial balance to Pat Fitzgerald. Carmody complemented Fitz's square-jawed, crew-cut, fist-pump enthusiasm with his dour, sarcastic, miserablist sideline demeanor. Fitz coaches the football team like it's a violent Boy Scout jamboree; Carmody comported himself like the basketball version of Sisyphus, forever trying to push a rock from the former Yugoslavia up the hill of the Big Ten basketball juggernaut. What would happen if Northwestern hires another young, enthusiastic coach? I don't want to alarm anyone, but I've done the research and it's entirely possible that the entire campus can be seized by a rash of spontaneous butt bumps, inability to function at any rate other than one game at a time, and the fist pumps, I can't even imagine the fist pumps.

A thoroughly scientific rendering of the Fitz/Carmody dynamic,
which now may be seriously compromised

As much as Bill Carmody's teams have frustrated NU fans, they also reached unprecedented heights. Even in dismal years, they provided memorable moments with his motley crew of overlooked locals and international findings. Who can forget when Northwestern downed Iowa 40-39 in what was later prosecuted in the International Basketball Court as a crime against the sport, or that time the Wildcats trampled upon the hopes and dreams of Rick Rickert in the Big Ten Tournament, which sort of seemed like a big deal at the time for some reason? Carmody led the 'Cats to numerous wins in dubious preseason tournaments held in unused Kumite arenas and three NITs, the only tournament that pauses for media timeouts and to allow shattered NCAA Tournament bubble teams to weep in the arms of loved ones.

A college basketball coach accepts an NIT bid

That progress was the essential Bill Carmody conundrum. Fans braying for his head on a stick could seem unreasonably impatient with a historically woeful program, but it was also possible to wonder whether Carmody could ever get the 'Cats over the hump. There is no sense in belaboring the debate. Northwestern's administration has made its decision. A new coach gets to stride into Welsh-Ryan arena and announce that he will be the one to break through the Tourney barrier, to compete in the Big Ten, and to be astonished that yes, that is actually where Northwestern plays its college basketball games.

NORTHWESTERN IS A FOOTBALL SCHOOL, HERE IS FOOTBALL STUFF

On a less depressing note, the 2013 Gator Bowl Champion Northwestern Wildcats return to the field to prepare for a season with dreams of Indianapolis in their eyes. They'll be playing in the newly-named "West" division with all of the LEGENDS as well as Tim Beckman's Northwestern-hating Illinois team and one of Indiana or Purdue. While many people are dancing upon the noble graves of the LEGENDS and LEADERS division names and the return to sane, cardinal direction-based titles, I'm extremely concerned. Jim Delany has been defeated, which portends a new round of megalomaniacal pronouncements. I expect that a cape-wearing Delany will mandate that Big Ten coaches stalk the sideline in full academic regalia in order to emphasize the conference's academic credentials, he will start replacing all positive adjectives in official press conferences with the words "legendary" or "leaderous," and he will purchase hour-long blocks of late-night programming on rival conferences' television networks that consist of him cackling on a golden throne and end with ominous threats of Big Ten expansion.

Scene from"You're Next, Missouri," set to air from 2-3
AM on the SEC Network

Northwestern has struck a deal to make a return to Wrigley Field after the Cubs finish renovations. The future Wrigley games will utterly fail if the renovations allow the full use of all available endzones. I refuse to count any touchdown that is scored in the designated "bad endzone," and any player who breaks the plane should be followed around by a group of robed malcontents who will pester him constantly with spooky endzone chants for the duration of the season. I've made my feelings clear to Northwestern and Cubs management by sending a literary letter that metaphorically describes the forbidden endzone as the former Soviet Union and scoring in it as taking my brain waves and using them to power a 30-foot mechanized Bukharin, so I'm sure they are taking the suggestions very seriously.

THIS IS MADNESS

As the nation full of college sports fans watch the empty, hollow, spectacle of March Madness, I'll be defiantly watching my reel-to-reel tapes of Tavaras Hardy, Jitim Young, Vedran Vukusic, Mohammed Hachad, Juice Thompson, John Shurna, and all of the rest of the Carmody-era Wildcats and pondering the future. Unfortunately, the athletic department has refused to issue vague riddles and rhymes that will gradually reveal the identity of the new basketball coach, so there's nothing to do but sit tight and wait. I look forward to cheering for Carmody wherever he ends up next, although I'd prefer not to see Northwestern victimized by backdoor cuts and the 1-3-1 zone defense anytime soon. More importantly, I look forward to a basketball season less marred by suspensions and injuries that will see Northwestern return to the postseason, even if its not the glory of the Dance. Perhaps we'll all meet back here next march, filled with insincere NIT braggadocio, ill thoughts about the Tulsa Golden Hurricane, and a new coach ready to launch Northwestern to the stratosphere of being the 68th-best basketball team in the nation.

It has been an agonizing eight months since the Wildcats' triumph over the Mississippi State Bulldogs in the Taxslayer.com Gator Bowl in Jacksonville. Since Northwestern's triumph over more than 60 years of post-season futility, regular-season futility, general football-related futility, and athletic futility so futile that it occasionally resembled some sort of performance art, the Wildcat basketball team stared into the depths of a post-Shurna world, Coach Carmody was granted his sarcastic stomping around the sidelines with his palms upturned papers, the Bulls somehow won a playoff series with their entire offense geared around Nate Robinson, the Hawks won a Stanley Cup involving nearly enough sudden-death overtime minutes to match the entire lockout-shortened season, the Cubs and White Sox continued to insult the sport of baseball, the United States won a Gold Cup, and this sentence was conceived, gestated, and finally burst forth onto the internet in a brazen assault against anything a rational person would ever consider reading.

Yes, winning a Stanley Cup was amazing, but what Chicago
sports fan did not enjoy the budding rivalry between Bulls
miniature bench gunners? I'm surprised John Lucas III did not
somehow hit either one of these persons with a folding chair at
some point

Meanwhile, the 'Cats are scant weeks from a visit to Berkeley with a high profile matchup against Cal carrying the exhilarating and terrifying burden of expectations.

COACH COLLINS, NORTHWESTERN BASKETBALL, AND OUR YOUNG MEN

The football team's win was quickly overshadowed by the firing of Bill Carmody and subsequent hiring of Chris Collins. With Collins, the 'Cats have another high-profile, young and energetic coach who seeks to do the impossible and bring a tourney berth to Evanston. Like Pat Fitzgerald, Chris Collins also seems to have undergone some Clockwork Orange procedure that has robbed him of the ability to communicate in anything other than high-intensity coach speak about Northwestern Excellence and Our Young Men, and Building the Program. Personally, I would prefer a brasher approach that would involve him aggressively making a lay-up in Bo Ryan's face or recreating his 2 Legit 2 Quit performance at press conferences, which is no doubt a way to inspire champions. After all, MC Hammer did not take over the rap world by talking about taking things one rap at a time but by implicitly threatening his audience with some sort of bodily or emotional harm.

Intimidation personified

The danger, of course, is that adding an additional young, energetic head coach could cause some sort of problem with the university's general humors situation. If, and this is only a terrifying hypothetical, so please do not go cowering into your shelter yet, Collins embraces the fist pump, the result could throw the entire Earth off of its rotational axis unless some soccer team in a corresponding Southern Hemisphere locale is able to locate two young coaches who celebrate with David Lee Roth kicks aimed at the horizon.

If these fists are a-shakin', the Earth may start a-quakin'

Collins faces a tall task ahead of him. He'll be aided by the return of stalwarts Drew Crawford, Dave Sobolewski, and another year from JerShon Cobb. Despite this talent, he's clearly building for the future when Northwestern takes its rightful place as a potential top-68 team that plays one or more games than they usually play.

WHAT IS THE BOUNCE-BALL MADNESS? FOOTBALL IS HERE

And so it is. The 'Cats return with as much preseason hype as the ill-fated 2001 team. Fitz's squad lost some stalwarts on the offensive line and on the defense, but returns the bulk of one of the most successful teams in school history. The dynamic tandem of Kain Colter and Venric Mark are back, with Trevor Siemian lurking in the shadows as someone willing to do the unthinkable and pass the ball in an ungentlemanly rebuke to Northwestern's Jazz Age rushing attack. Dan Vitale only got better and will potentially rumble for many yards, although I have to consult my AP Football Cliches Style Manual to see if superbacks count as a position where players rumble for yardage along with fullbacks, tight ends, and terrified linemen with eyes the size of serving platters.

A definitive moment in the history of football rumbling that
does not involve "William" The Refrigerator Perry

The defense returns Tyler Scott, who was second in the Big Ten in sacks, linebacking revelation Chi Chi Ariguzo and ball-hawk Damian Proby, and a legitimately intimidating secondary that includes Ibraheim Campbell and Nick VanHoose. The return of these talented players and others who will no doubt make their mark in 2013 has not settled the important strategic issue of how many heart attacks Pat Fitzgerald plans to give me in the fourth quarter of football games this season. While certified 'Cat-killer Matt McGloin has gone off to ply his dark arts in the NFL, Devin Gardner and Tyler Martinez have hopes to rob my scalp of its hair, and Braxton Miller is bench-pressing garbage trucks and throwing footballs through the entire Get Smart doorway apparatus. Last year's defense was monstrous against the run; this season, perhaps they can strike fear into opposing quarterbacks beyond the usual taunts, japes, and threats to grind their bread through some obscure bone-based mechanism.

Good gravy, the Athletic Department is literally using
this image on the banner of the official Northwestern
Football Website. I fear that Pat Fitzgerald may be slowly
turning into a Mario Brother

PLEASE PASS THE BISCUITS

In 1938, flour salesman Wilbert Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel decided that Texas's corrupt, venal, inefficient, and exclusionary political culture was lacking something. It lacked an unqualified radio host in the governor's mansion devoted to playing the greatest hits of Texas swing and shilling for Hillbilly Flour. Therefore, he started one of the most incomprehensible political runs in the history of the United States that took him from Austin to the United States Senate. The ascent of Pappy O'Daniel is wonderfully chronicled in Please Pass the Biscuits, Pappy: Pictures of Governor W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel by Bill Crawford and John Anderson, which combines an entertaining narrative of O'Daniel's career with a wealth of incredible photographs of O'Daniel glad-handing hundreds of persons and inanimate objects.

Pappy O'Daniel enjoys the spoils of victory

O'Daniel, who inspired the identically-named radio enthusiast facing down a challenge from a broom-wielding opponent in O Brother Where Art Thou, rose as a marketing executive with the Light Crust Flour Company. In the early 1930s, he found a goldmine in radio advertising by starting a program that featured music interspersed by his own folksy musings about a wide array of topics, many of which alluded to the benefits of Light Crust flour. More importantly, he hitched his wagon to Bob Wills, the King of Texas Swing, who called his band the Light Crust Doughboys and made O'Daniel's show a sensation across the state. Eventually, O'Daniel and Wills had a falling out, but O'Daniel hired a new band that emulated Wills's sound, right down to his signature yelping. By the mid-30s, O'Daniel started his own flour company, Hillbilly Flour, and his own band, the Hillbilly Boys.

Because we live in the twenty-first century, you don't need to go to a specialized library or even put on pants to hear an example of O'Daniel at the height of his powers, selling flour and sweet fiddle licks across the oil fields and prairies because someone has put them on the internet. In addition to selling flour, O'Daniel wrote songs, including the ballad "Beautiful Texas" and the Hillbilly Boys theme song, which is the catchiest flour jingle ever created by human endeavor.

The original nature of O'Daniel's run for governor is not clear and was probably partially conceived as a stunt to sell more flour. But O'Daniel packed people into his rallies, which were essentially massive open-air concerts. He campaigned on some promises for pensions and with a platform of the Ten Commandments, apparently prepared to lose the wife-coveting and graven-idol lobbies that had were sweeping through 1930s Texas with wild campaign promises to build graven idols of neighbors' wives.

Somehow, O'Daniel swept into victory in the Democratic Primary, which all but assured victory in the general election. While in office, he continued to put out his weekly radio show from the Governor's Mansion, a move unprecedented until Jesse "The Body" Ventura commentated on XFL Football Games while still serving as governor of Minnesota. Naturally, he swept to reelection in 1940, presumably because other candidates had crappier fiddle players.

Pappy O'Daniel seemed to subscribe to the Le Petomane School of
Western Governing

By then, however, his ambitions had become grander. In 1941, Senator Morris Shepherd died as did the aged son of Sam Houston that O'Daniel sent to replace him. Pappy O'Daniel intended to claim the seat for himself. At a special election, O'Daniel joined a slate of colorful candidates that included the barrel-clad, the bellicose, and Lyndon Baines Johnson (Crawford and Anderson compare this to the 2003 California recall election). He defeated LBJ by less than 2,000 votes by somehow out-corrupting him, the only man to ever defeat Johnson in an election. Once in the Senate, O'Daniel sunk into relative obscurity as he became increasingly devoted to ferreting out communists in the American government, as was the style at the time.

O FOOTBALL

It's time to watch our lads in purple helmets smash into other gentlemen in different colored helmets, time to live in a world where Northwestern football is actually seen not only as decent but good, time to watch the NCAA fall all over itself in comical fits of hypocrisy, time to watch the Big Ten absorb insults as to the quality of its football, and time to savor the final year of LEGENDS and LEADERS and a conference bereft of Rutgers and Maryland. To be honest, I'm baffled as to what to expect and still overwhelmed from the bowl win. The logical next step is to keep the streak improbably going to Indianapolis, to Pasadena, and in the service of fine flour products for the entire family.

Last night, thousands of people swarmed to stadiums bathed in light, bands serenaded them with fanfares invariably coming from the classic American 70s jazz rock songbook, the slightly-less-hulking men booted their footballs into graceful parabolas where they fell into the arms of another person who tried desperately to avoid being run over by eleven human steamrollers. Football!

College football is a bewildering mass of contradictions. It is rife with the pageantry of dance teams, marching bands that continue to dress like Otto von Bismarck, people who convert recreational vehicles into elaborate mobile meat distribution centers, the South, and an infectious student enthusiasm that can best be described as Gin Lane drunkenness. It's enough to completely baffle and overwhelm outsiders such as Stephen Fry, who is unable to contemplate a flyover by both military jets and a war damn eagle.

College football is fueled by young people risking their knees and skulls for our amusement, watched over by a keystone police force determined to stop them from selling their signature or their pants while the grizzled, twenty-foot visages of the coaches shill woodenly for a variety of comical local products.

College football is a the engine of innovation as coaches from smaller programs desperately try to score against the NFL behemoths on the rosters of the BCS powerhouses. In 2013, Northwestern will deploy up to eight quarterbacks simultaneously: A running specialist, a passing specialist, a run-option guy, a pass blocking quarterback, a quarterback who may or may not punt at any time, an all-time quarterback who also gets to play quarterback for the other team, and Kain Colter, who will do all of those things simultaneously.

College football sells itself on tradition, while universities move conferences and abandon century-old rivalries at the drop of a hat in order to vacuum up any visible crumb from an enormous pie. The Big Ten will have 26 teams next year, at least two Lucrative Conference Championship Games, and a spin-off Big Ten Network 2 which will feature a show where Tim Beckman destroys all of the purple goods in a different retail establishment each week and one where Bucky Badger stares unnervingly into the camera for at least 30 uninterrupted minutes.

Big Ten Network 2 goes highbrow in its academic programming

Welcome back.

NORTHWESTERN IS PLAYING FOOTBALL AGAIN

This Saturday, the Wildcats return to the field to take on the Cal Golden Bears. Cal went 3-9 last year leading to a new direction for the program. Now, Cal looks to head coach and potential Rocky trainer Sonny Dykes to right the ship. These teams have some ancient history, as the Wildcats defeated them in the mythical 1949 Rose Bowl although this happened so long ago that I'm not sure the 1949 Rose Bowl wasn't a chariot race that the 'Cats won by engineering one of those evil chariot race contraptions that sliced up the other chariots' wheels while the drivers cackled relentlessly. Dykes, a disciple of Mike Leach, will brings a variation of his high-powered aerial attack that fans have taken to calling the Bear Raid.

Northwestern's defensive preparations for the Cal game have become
increasingly sophisticated as game day approaches

Running the show will be a true freshman, Jared Goff. He'll have to deal with Ibraheim Campbell, Nick VanHoose, Tyler Scott, Chi Chi Ariguzo, and Damien Proby, and the 'Cats will hope to pressure him into early mistakes. Meanwhile, Cal's defense needs to find ways to shut down the Colter/Siemian/Mark combination. Both offenses rely on deception to open holes and get receivers open. By the end of the game, the players will clear off of the field while Dykes and Mick McCall stand at the 50-yard-line in an Offensive Coordinators' Duel, furiously scribbling on white boards until one of them runs out of marker or collapses into exhaustion.

"Pro T Flare D," Dykes incanted

WHAT ON EARTH IS A SUCCESSFUL NORTHWESTERN SEASON

Northwestern comes into this game ranked #22 in the country. The football season previews that I have been devouring from the excellent and insightful to the television people vapidly yammering about football to kill airtime have mentioned Northwestern as a team to look out for the in Big Ten. Venric Mark is on preseason Doak Walker watch lists. Commentators have expressed sympathy for teams that have been Coltered and those whose Coltering awaits them this season. Even the Northwestern defense has not been maligned. This is exciting and terrifying.

One of the things that I've really enjoyed about Northwestern football is that it is generally liberated from insane fan expectations to win a national title every single year. College basketball and football are rare sports in that they allow for small triumphs: Ending an embarrassing national losing streak and throwing goalposts in the lake, beating a storied rival, making it to some benighted bowl game sponsored by a company whose dot-com bona fides have made it defunct before kickoff, actually winning a bowl game, maybe making that basketball tournament that I've been hearing about even if they get run off the court by the Washington Generals who in the future have given NCAA eligibility and been moved to a separate conference with the Globetrotters, only the Globetrotters have been disqualified and have vacated generations of wins because of glitter buckets.

For fans of teams looking up at the traditional powerhouses, college football can seem monotonous and unfair, perennially under the boot heels of Ohio State and Michigan. But the fact that winning begets winning can also be a source of hope. There's mercifully no tanking in college sports; otherwise, Northwestern would have been an unstoppable football juggernaut and I would be spending my free time screaming at Paul Finebaum. And look where the Wildcats are now.

It is no secret that the Wildcats have a very good football team this season. And it is no secret that the tough schedule, bad luck, or a few unfortunate injuries could derail them short of contention for the LEGENDS title. Even if they get all the breaks, it will be difficult to top last year's ten victories, plus the bowl game victory that caused Pat Fitzgerald to parade around the severed head of a plush monkey doll like a medieval warlord.

Patfitz Khan exhorts Our Young Horde to plunder one village at a time

There has been no football played yet. The Wildcats have yet to thrill us with an overtime victory or shatter us with one of those fourth quarters. On the eve of this football season then, we should enjoy what this season will bring: purple-clad fans attempting to intimidate people with fist-claws, Venric Mark and Kain Colter incinerating hapless defenders, interceptions and fumbles, Dave Eanet highlights, and at least four solid months of mocking Tim Beckman anonymously on the internet. Football!

Kain Colter went down in a dazed heap several minutes into the game. Venric Mark spent a lot of time surveying the field from an exercise bike. Jared Goff emerged from his football pupa and sprouted wings to the tune of a record passing day. And somehow, the Wildcats prevailed in Berkeley for their first win the season, Pat Fitzgerald's eighth consecutive opening victory, and further movement down the college football rankings.

Northwestern quarterback Trevor Siemian dodged Cal defenders and airplane
attacks as he stepped in for an injured Kain Colter to lead a new Northwestern
option offense where the only option is passing all over the place

Fans spent all day waiting for the game, which started on the other side of the International Date Line and had managed to wrap up the first quarter by Labor Day. Fortunately, the time slot garnered the game a lot of attention for late-night East Coast revelers who wanted something on in the background to drown out the sounds of vomiting.

The Northwestern defense looked at times on their heels against the Bear Raid, but were led by linebacker Collin Ellis. Ellis plucked two passes out of the air and scampered into the endzone, debuting a scoring method known in the NFL as the Chicago Bear Raid.

Unfortunately, the victory was marred by accusations of gamesmanship, chicanery, and cheatfulness. Sonny Dykes, who nearly broke the Heston Scale of Incredulity, accused Fitzgerald and the coaching staff of instructing the 'Cats to feign injury in order to gain precious seconds of rest and slow the fast-paced Cal offense.

An angry Sonny Dykes demands a giant globe to place on his
shoulders so he can demonstrate that, like Atlas, he has to carry
the burden of alleged timeclock tampering by the Northwestern
defense

SO YOUR FOOTBALL TEAM HAS BEEN ACCUSED OF MALFEASANCE

A few points about the fake injury allegations that we are not going to shy away from as we Embrace Debate:

1. Cal fans are angry, upset, and offended by what they see as a clear case of false injuries. RING THE CHURCH BELLS, LIGHT OFF FIREWORKS, CALL YOUR GRANDMOTHERS! You know you have arrived as a football program when opposing fans are accusing your team of cheating, when opposing coaches allegedly claim that your coach has made a mockery of the sport, and when people on the internet call the team gutless, disgraceful, and other words that professional wrestlers use to disparage other professional wrestlers. Sonny Dykes is sitting in a dark room right now that he has painted purple, hoisting a goblet full of grape soda, and plotting elaborate revenge fantasies against Northwestern. Northwestern! Tim Beckman just sent him a Northwestern-hating starter kit from his warehouse full of Northwestern-hating starter kits that have been collecting dust in an unidentified Champaign-area grain silo.

2. If the allegations are true, we may be witnessing a transition to Evil Pat Fitzgerald. That would mean that he lets his hair grow unkempt by moving up a notch on the crew cut safety guard, and instead of butt bumps and fist pumps, he spends the duration of the game cackling at the opposition like a villain from Mike Tyson's Punch-Out. Soon, Fitz will replace the team with His Young Men, who shockingly take it two or even three games at a time. He will refuse to talk to beat reporters unless they refer to him as Fist Pumpgerald. He will change the team motto to "Whatever is Nefarious."

Evil Fitz performs villainy outside Ross-Ade Stadium

Unfortunately for Northwestern fans, there is only one way a program led by Evil Pat Fitzgerald program will develop: he inevitably threatens the Prime Minister of New Zealand, absconds with her on his hydrofoil yacht, and provokes a war between the United States and the British Commonwealth of Nations that ends when America is invaded and grateful citizens celebrate their long-awaited return to the bosom of empire. With the exception of an Evil Pat Fitzgerald, those are all things that happened in former New Zealand Prime Minister Julius Vogel's 1889 novel Anno Domini 2000, or, Woman's Destiny which presciently predicted several technologies on the horizon but failed to anticipate that Victorian mustache twirling would no longer be in vogue at the dawn of the twenty-first century

3. Dykes's post-game handshake/admonishment with Fitzgerald was greatly disappointing. Instead of glaring at him, Dykes should have registered his disgust by hitting the turf, clutching his hamstrings, and then rolling around on the ground, much like how Australian comedians protested World Cup diving at the Italian Consulate.

4. No one wants to see injury-faking, diving, flopping, or what FIFA refers to as "simulation" become a major part of college football. Soccer fans have been complaining about it for years; the NBA has attempted to identify, fine, and publicly shame floppers. But while I wish players would conform to the letter of the law in all sports, I can't deny that I secretly enjoy flopping in the NBA because instead of pretending they are merely injured, players react like they are Western stuntmen perched precariously on a balcony.

The Assassination of Chris Bosh by the Coward Carlos Boozer

5. Earlier today, ex-Chicago Bear Brian Urlacher revealed that the Bears had a fake injury program where a designated player would go down when a member of the coaching staff pantomimed Olympic diving motions. No former offensive player has yet come out of the woodwork to report the signal used to let a defensive player charge unmolested into Jay Cutler's solar plexus.

6. I hope that further Wildcat triumphs are free from controversy unless it is comfortably in the realm of ridiculous, such as by successfully convincing an opposing coach that the forward pass has been outlawed by having students haunt his room dressed as a Christmas Carole version of Walter Camp.

'CUSE ME

Last year, Northwestern traveled to the Syracuse and required a gutsy drive from on-demand folk hero Trevor Siemian to pull out a win. Things have changed. The Orange are without head coach Doug Marrone, quarterback Ryan Nassib, and the musty, fetid Carrier Dome which is defended by a moat made of sweat. The schools have played enough to cultivate a decent non-conference rivalry beyond ESPN personalities that want us to care where they went to journalism school. Syracuse lost to Penn State in the opener, and playing two Big Ten teams in the preseason has made them an Official Unofficial Associate Honorary Big Ten Member as the Big Ten Network prepares its retrospective on Big Ten Legend Jim Brown.

Syracuse should test the Northwestern run defense as they return backs Jerome Smith and Pierre-Tyson Gulley. Kain Colter plans to play, but his status is uncertain. Venric Mark remains day-to-day with unspecified injuries. Syracuse fans will nonetheless be unexcited to see Siemian. Some claim that he embellished a late hit that helped keep the final drive alive. It is also entirely possible that Marrone, who remains in the upstate New York area, will be secretly coaching the game from a windowless Buffalo Bills facility and unknown mustachioed walk-on quarterback "Bryan Bassin" will unexpectedly show up in the second half to fling passes at the depleted Wildcat secondary.

THE VIEW FROM THE TOP TWENTY

With all of the hoopla surrounding the Northwestern-Cal game, I should only hope that no one can accuse the 'Cats of trickery in a win against Syracuse. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and hope that no one in the upcoming contest gets hurt, injured, or shaken up. The Northwestern Wildcats should win the old fashioned way: with the sudden realization that the opposing quarterback this whole time has been a cleverly-disguised Kain Colter only at the precise moment when he lofts a pass into the arms of Ibraheim Campbell, removes his wig, and disappears into the cheering purple throng at Ryan Field.

Last Saturday, the 'Cats opened the season at Ryan Field by hosting out-of-conference nemesis Syracuse. The 'Cats hoped to improve on their first game with the comforts of home: a reasonable time slot instead of playing at some ridiculous midnight moon time, stands full of Wildcat partisans, and an inspiring tarp that stood in for empty seats that opposing teams could look towards and imagine thousands of angry fist claws shouting at them on third down, theoretically.

Early speculation remains that the tarp will be deployed at a future Big Ten game--
imagine the opposing team feeling comfortable down by the north endzone and
prepared to go about its business when the tarp is suddenly lifted to reveal a secret
cache of Northwestern fans in a common football tactic known as the "Trojan Tarp"
(Photo from nusports.com)

Northwestern and Syracuse have played enough over the past few years to create something of a rivalry. Some Syracuse fans have complained about the officiating in the last game that allowed Northwestern's dramatic comeback; I will never forgive Greg Paulus for his excellent play in a win against Northwestern, and I'm disappointed that Fitz never returned the favor by putting in Juice Thompson or Luka Mirkovic in for a play to show them what it's like and also to accrue a never-used NCAA infraction for attempting to play graduated basketball players in a football game because of spite.

WHAT THE HELL KIND OF WIN WAS THAT? I WANT MY MONEY BACK

I think as Northwestern fans, we can all be greatly disappointed by the kind of football played by Northwestern the past weekend. Kain Colter returned to combine with Trevor Siemian into an unstoppable bomb-throwing, scrambling, optioning, quarterbacking monster that I will be referring to as The Colterian.

As the old football adage says: if you have two quarterbacks you
have no quarterbacks unless they are melded into a two-headed
multi-limbed mutant capable of optioning to itself and coming
up with the world's most elaborate celebratory handshake

The high-powered offense and an opportunistic defense that snagged another four interceptions allowed the 'Cats to leap out to a 34-7 lead at the half. I don't know about you, but I watch Northwestern for the adrenaline after last year's Four Quarters of Terror campaign, not to watch them slice up a defense, to watch Dan Vitale and Treyvon Green become stars, and to see the spread offense wreak havoc with an arsenal of receivers who are all named Jones. There weren't even accusations of Wacky Races skulduggery to have opinions about and no coaches calling the team a disgrace to the concept of college football which is doubly insulting because the NCAA exists and sets a pretty high standard of being an insult to college football.

I hope the Northwestern football establishment realizes the disappointment of fans who expect to spend the duration of games strapped into their recliners as the Wildcat defense is expected to perform a Reverse Teen Wolf and return to a feeble teenage Michael J. Fox status that allows the other team to start inexplicably executing hail mary passes and Roundtree Catches. What kind of lunatic who is invested in a college football team wants to see them playing extraordinarily well against an ACC team because of an incredibly entertaining offense that dominates even with Venric Mark out? I don't ask much from Northwestern football other than a vision of oblivion in the last five minutes of the fourth quarter where I enter an otherworldly plane, an out-of-body experience that is happening because I'm worried that the football team I like might lose.

BRONCO BUSTING

This week, Northwestern will play Western Michigan. This was not supposed to happen. It came about because of the Assassination of the Northwestern-Vandebilt Rivalry by the Coward James Franklin. As you may recall, and given that you are reading like the eighth-most trafficked Northwestern football blog on the internet I'm guessing that you do, Vanderbilt canceled its 2013 and 2014 series against the Wildcats with a variety of low-tech notification methods including a telegraph, a passenger pigeon, a Soviet-era analogue hotline, and a disastrous attempt to send a gorilla-gram with an actual gorilla that just ended in a tragic Nashville-area gorilla rampage presumably because Northwestern kept beating them and James Franklin and the Vanderbilt Athletic Department are yellower-bellied than the Yella Fella Yellawood pitchman who is apparently a powerful football booster at Auburn University.

No, thank you, I prefer not to be Coltered, says a
terrified James Franklin. I should probably add here
that I have no idea if Vandy dropped the series because
they wanted an easier schedule, but I took a vow long
ago that if I could vaguely accuse an opposing athletic
program of ducking Northwestern I would react the
same way that Clubber Lang would because I train
alone, I blog alone, and I tweet "shut up old man" at
any geriatric Vanderbilt supporters I can identify
in cyberspace

Western Michigan is a program in transition. They are led by 32-year-old first-year head coach P.J. Fleck, who has the square-jawed enthusiasm of a Fitz but has decided that he is obsessed with overwrought boat-paddling metaphors.

Fleck traces the influence of his motivational techniques to Hagar the Horrible

The Broncos have had a rough season so far. Last week, they were upset by FCS Nicholls State in the Fortress Waldo Stadium (which is perhaps the platonic ideal for a MAC stadium name, with the possible exception of Kelly-Shorts-- much like the Great Fillmore/Arthur Muttonchop Debate, I believe that is best left to the taste of the reader). Northwestern is expected to prevail here against an inexperienced team whose best days are ahead of it.

It would be a mistake, though, to assume the 'Cats are taking this lightly. Pat Fitzgerald is more committed to living one game at a time than Vin Diesel is to living one quarter-mile at a time and expressing himself through tank top. Fitz doesn't care about what happens beyond that; if a government agency were to deploy to his house and tell him that in two weeks, a group of malevolent aliens will invade the Earth and the only way to stop them is by commandeering a spacecraft that can be piloted by high-intensity fist pumps and that Fitz was the only one who could stop the imminent destruction of the planet, I'm fairly sure he would send them away because he wants to take another look at that Western Michigan bunch formation.

HAT UPDATE

I don't know if you've been paying attention, but the Illini had a fairly convincing victory against a Cincinnati team that had previously laid waste to Purdue University. This week, they take on a ranked Washington team in Soldier Field. According to ESPN's Big Ten Blog, "Illinois athletic director Mike Thomas said back in 2011 that he hoped the university would become the 'king of Chicago,'" in the escalating War to Determine Chicago's Big Ten Team. Jim Phillips then escalated the situation by dressing in regal purple robes in front of a map of the Demesne Kingdom of of Chicagoland with sketches of dragons in Missouri and giants near Peoria. The desperate attempt of Northwestern and Illinois to capture the Chicago market has been one of the most dramatic turf wars in the Big Ten as they vie against each other and the approximately 99% of Chicagoans who root for the Bears and whatever college they went to.

Meanwhile, Tim Beckman and new offensive coordinator Bill Cubit are planning on extricating themselves from the Big Ten cellar this season. A win against Washington would not only be a major step in righting the program and establishing the Beck Man Era in Champaign, it would also be a warning shot fired across the bow of Northwestern, a notice that the Beck Men are coming for The Hat. As we speak, Beckman is doing pull-ups in a dimly-lit corner of the Illini football complex and had #HAT tattooed across both of his sets of knuckles.

A CLOOTS BY ANY OTHER NAME

"However, when the revolution broke out, he changed his name to Anacharsis Cloots and set himself up as a spokesman for the human race."

That is a pretty good sentence, and it is by Hugh Gough in an essay about the French Revolution's effect on Europe (in his edited volume Ireland and the French Revolution). He is referring, of course, to the Baron de Cloots, a Dutch-Prussian nobleman who got caught up in the revolutionary fervor of 1789 as a way to promote his ideas about a broader revolutionary world state. Cloots was a close relative of Cornelius De Pauw, a French philosopher who pushed the idea that the New World degenerated all men and beasts who arrive there. Americans took umbrage to this. Even ideological enemies Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton could agree that they did not live in an ecological backwater that stunted growth and had cruddy, inferior wildlife. Jefferson and Madison exchanged notes on weasel measurements in order to counter claims of degeneracy; Jefferson attempted to counter the claims of the Comte de Buffon, the leading degeneracy advocate, with a process that could best be described as "take a look at this moose-- who is degenerate now, Buffon?"

Buffon scoffs at the paltry size of American
weasels

Cloots got too wrapped up in the Revolution for his own good. As the Terror folded back on itself, Cloots was unable to see the Revolution carried into universal human principle. On the other hand, he left a legacy of inspiring historians to craft spectacular sentences, such as this one by William Doyle in the Oxford History of the French Revolution:

"To substantiate the charge of a foreign plot, a clutch of colorful aliens perished with them too, including Clootz, who bade farewell to his beloved human race in front of the biggest crowd ever to surround the guillotine."

WEEK 3 IS HERE, EVERYONE

Western Michigan may not be the most daunting opponent on the schedule, but the Broncos have nothing to lose in Evanston. Fitzgerald will attempt to guide his team to another rejection of Northwestern football as we know it by winning without trying to kill his fans and without accusations of intrigue. And then he will take the title of Anacharsis Fitz, Spokesman For All Humanity when he declares "Something something, Our Young Men, Winning, Go 'Cats."

Fistpump.

A week after routing Syracuse, the Western Michigan Broncos rowed into Ryan Field and gave the 'Cats a first-quarter scare. The offense stagnated and the defense yielded large chunks of yards to a quarterback operating under the pseudonym "Tyler Van Tubbergen." Fitz pumped his fists to little avail. Automatic kick machine Jeff Budzien missed a 42-yarder. The Broncos went up 3-0. The 'Cats finally scored a touchdown after about 17 grueling minutes. On the next play, Van Tubbergen found a wide-open receiver streaking down the field for a 75-yard touchdown. Charlton Heston sunk to his knees in front of the Statue of Liberty. Mighty Casey took his second strike, looking. Edvard Munch was hired to paint literally every Northwestern fan at the game. Things looked grim.

Northwestern fans react to a 10-7 Western Michigan lead

The scare, however, was temporary, and the 'Cats rallied behind Treyvon Green to run up a 24-10 lead at the half. Green rushed for 158 yards while Kolter added 106 on the ground. Ibraheim Campbell intercepted another pass, making that 5 straight games dating back to last season. Campbell has grabbed picks off of tip drills, on overthrown passes, by jumping routes, and through the long con known as the "The Viscount's Rake" which involves hiring a confidant to serve as an opposing team's offensive coordinator who designs plays specifically to go in Campbell's direction and then, in the dead of night, uses counterfeit university documents to rename opposing sports facilities after a fake donor so they have to play their basketball games at the "Ernest P. Worrell Family Arena." In the summer, Campbell will intern with a consortium of suave international jewel thieves.

In the end, the 'Cats were too much for P.J. Fleck's squad. The game was never in doubt in the second half, and it's possible that the 'Cats just came out flat in a bad first half that will henceforth be known as the "Van Tubbergen Mutiny." Fitz prefers not to dwell. Ever since that horrible football laboratory explosion, he spends his time after games in torn clothes, wandering around Sheridan Road, unable to remember anything about the game except for the fact that he has an undefeated Maine squad coming to Evanston on Saturday.

MAINE EVENT

Maine is Northwestern's only FCS opponent. The Black Bears are 3-0, including a win against an FBS opponent. Granted, that team, UMass, is in its second year in the FBS and had come off an opener where massive Wisconsin linemen sat on them for 60 minutes.

UMass plays at Vanderbilt this week, and I plan to go to the game wearing purple
boxing trunks and scream I WANT VANDERBILT! DO YOU HEAR ME OLD MAN?
I DON'T CARE IF THESE CLUBBER LANG REFERENCES ARE GETTING STALE
AND REDUNDANT

Regardless of their record, Northwestern should beat Maine handily. But games against the FCS this season are hardly gimmees. In Week 1, four FCS schools scored upsets, including season-derailing victories by North Dakota State over Kansas State and Eastern Washington over a ranked Oregon State team. FBS schools pay these teams for record-padding-- after a loss, angry FBS coaches should be forced to remain on the 50-yard line to present their opponents with over-sized novelty checks made out to "I'll See You In Hell."

Northwestern, of course, is no stranger to the FCS home upset. That is because Northwestern received a grant in 1975 to explore every possible avenue of football-based humiliation. Circumstances certainly did not favor the 'Cats that year. The New Hampshire game was the emotional home opener in Fitz's first year as the team attempted to handle the loss of Randy Walker. New Hampshire also had a ludicrous speed offense coached by none other than Chip Kelly; I assume that most of Kelly's offensive concepts are based on neutralizing Tim McGarigle.

(I should add here that I know McGarigle had graduated before the 2006 season, but I assume Kelly was preparing for him anyway because of a little-known NCAA by-law that said if McGarigle was living on a houseboat reliving the tragic memories of the Sun Bowl, it would be legal for him to suit up for one last season, but only if he initially refused to play and then told the NU coaching staff that this time he was playing by his rules and also because this time it is personal. There is also an NCAA by-law that says we haven't had a dumb McGarigle joke here for awhile and I'm going to work it in this way even though it makes much more sense to reference his stint as an opposing linebackers' coach for Western Michigan because we don't do things by the book here at BYCTOM. Go ahead and take away my badge, Chief, but I'm working this one my way.)

MAINE

Maine in the nineteenth century was of course the United States's primary front in a war against rapacious British land-grabs from Canada. In the 1830s, an area claimed by the U.S. as the northern part of Maine was the subject of a border dispute arising from vague provisions of the Treaty of Ghent. That treaty attempted to restore the borders to those agreed upon in 1783. One can only speculate that the Treaty of Ghent did not resolve this issue because delegates became too distracted by the Ghent nightlife, which is how the phrase "like a diplomat at Ghent" became a winking euphemism in nineteenth-century foreign policy circles.

Meanwhile, tensions increased as lumberjacks from New Brunswick began lumber-jacking in the disputed territory. American and Canadian lumberjacks organized themselves into armed militias. The Governor of Maine denounced the Canadians as "unruly wood thieves." Maine land agents were captured. Sabers were rattled. A skirmish was interrupted by an unexpected bear attack, as one would expect during nineteenth-century conflicts.

Finally, British and American diplomats formed a compromise treaty. According to Wikipedia at least, this compromise involved both sides allegedly hiding maps and accusations that the British forged a map made by Benjamin Franklin to convince Americans to accept the treaty. I have no idea if that is true, but I'd prefer to assume that all nineteenth-century diplomacy hinged on things that Nicolas Cage would do in one of those movies where the Declaration of Independence is actually a code for a Secret Declaration of Independence that replaced a list of accusations against King George with a number of rhyming clues about a Crown Jewel hidden in one of Alexander Hamilton's wigs that is being held in Teddy Roosevelt's right nostril at Mount Rushmore and there are evil treasure hunters trying to get to it first in order to compromise America's Freedom.

Wait a minute, it says here that the American territories were won by the Duke of
Portland in a crooked horse race and his descendants can use any inhabitant for
cudgeling practice

The U.S. and Canada remain in dispute over the Machias Seal Island off the coast of Maine. The territory is referred to as a "grey zone" with both sides attempting to flood the island with lighthouse keepers. It is also the setting for a movie I'm producing called "The Gray Zone: Bear Puncher," where Liam Neeson exploits the murky international boundaries to guide illegal bear hunting expeditions but of course something goes wrong and Nesson is forced to punch dozens of increasingly-larger bears and, if we get the budget, a gigantic lobster with a granite chin.

JUST MAINE, NOTHING ELSE GOING ON HERE

Northwestern looks like a legitimate challenger for the LEGENDS crown as Nebraska's defense was dismantled by a good UCLA team at home and Michigan was nearly done in by a plucky Akron team supported by the powerful Michigan Suffering Lobby. Michigan State is undefeated but is planning to play every single eligible man on their roster at quarterback for a snap this season.

You'll notice this post has not looked past the Maine game. But the fact is that if Northwestern defeats the Black Bears (in a civilized, un-Neeson-like manner, we presume), they will be 4-0 heading into a bye week before a looming showdown with Ohio State. And, if Ohio State beats Florida A&M and a tough Wisconsin team that has spent the past week sending threatening telegrams to officials, we could see a showdown between the two unbeaten teams in what we can calmly describe as a GODDAMN FOOTBALL APOCALYPSE 2013 AT RYAN FIELD. And the Four Horsemen of the Football Apocalypse shall appear: Sack, Fumble, Hamstring Injury, and NCAA Sanctions for Allegedly Selling Your Own Pants. Lee Corso could potentially put on a Wildcat Hat. The game will be a sold-out free-for-all with Northwestern fans going all out to claim up to 25% of their own stadium. Pat Fitzgerald could end the game needing experimental fist replacement surgery.

It's all very exciting, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. We all know Fitz has nothing but Maine on his mind. He has contacted the State Department for Grey Zone maps to better understand the Maine mindset. Next week, he will focus on the bye week by scrutinizing tapes of patio furniture and lawn maintenance equipment. Let's hope for a quiet week unmarred by bear attacks of the literal and football variety.

arricade your homes and places of business. The Football Apocalypse is here. As it is written in the Book of Football Revelations and the Associated Press, there will come riders from the East. They will bring with them the Signs of the End of Times: Poisonous Nuts, Terrifying Googly-Eyed Mascots, Satantic I-Dotting Rituals where the I stands for the phrase well-known in demonology: "I intend to do evil things upon your person," A Creepy Geriatric Whose Head is Not His Head, Weird Quasi-Biblical Prose that is not going to make it to the end of this paragraph before Getting Tedious, and other augers of an Intention to Ruin Your Evening.
Gameday is Nigh!

Northwestern football is many things, but I think we can all agree that it is historically a blight upon the noble narrative of college-aged men who wish to smash into each other in a vaguely organized fashion. Lots of momentous events have occurred in one hundred plus years since Northwestern football players started futilely attempting to score touchdowns. Most importantly, many of them used to have mustaches and now, very few of them do.

In the 1930s, the term "Great Depression" was coined by a person who had attended more than a dozen Wildcat football games. Images of Northwestern's offense have been known to turn the stomach of even the most hardened sports beat reporters, even those from Cleveland. In the late 1970s, Northwestern lost 2,000 consecutive football games to Big Ten foes, non-conference opponents, a resurgent Chicago Dental College that had been nursing a Count of Monte Cristo Revenge plot for nearly 70 years, and carnival rubes who had never played football before but managed to score effortlessly on Wildcat defenders and earn themselves a stuffed gorilla.

Kennedy's moon mission speech initially asked "why does Northwestern play football at all?" after
his line about Rice playing Texas, but it was scrubbed because Northwestern winning football games
seemed far less feasible than landing on the moon with only analogue tape machines and short-sleeved
shirts, but also because the nation was not prepared to hear a Kennedy attempt to say the word "Northwestern"

The world changed in 1995, when Darnell Autrey and Pat Fitzgerald led an 85-man blasphemy against the Touchdown Jesus, the Wildcats went to the Rose Bowl, and they won an almost-unfathomable Big Ten championship. Other Big Ten football fans may mock Northwestern supporters for investing the year 1995 as such a turning point for thinking about the team, but think about this: in 1995, Under Siege 2: Dark Territory came out, and after that, Steven Seagal's career entered a death spiral that led to the Glimmer Man, Exit Wounds, and a million interchangeable films where he waddles listlessly around Bulgaria. Clearly, 1995 is not just an important point in Northwestern football, but one that marks a significant shift in all of Western civilization.

Actual, latter-day Seagal movies. First off, kudos to Seagal for appearing in a film
where the word "belly" features prominently in the title. Secondly, please enjoy
this curated list of actual Seagal movies as the titles get progressively more generic:
Out For a Kill, Mercenary for Justice, Shadow Man, Attack Force, Flight of Fury,
Urban Justice, Against the Dark, Driven to Kill, Pistol Whipped, and Maximum
Conviction, which I assume is about a man who, driven by his convictions, begins
a massive letter-writing campaign to reform City Hall before successfully running
for office as a reform candidate and then karate chopping 600 armed Bulgarians

Even after this resurgence, Northwestern has shifted to imploding in increasingly heart-wrenching ways in big games and especially bowl games. Somewhere, Big Ten Legend Eric Crouch is polishing his Alamo Bowl MVP trophy. Jeremy Maclin is still scampering across the Alamodome turf. And someone has hired that UCLA guy who returned two consecutive onside kicks for touchdowns to head a Department of Northwestern Football Antagonism.

But here we are in 2013. The 'Cats have exorcised their bowl demons. They have exuberantly ripped apart a plush monkey doll and paraded its head around at a press conference like the world's least impressive Jim Corbett impersonators. They are 4-0 again and facing an undefeated Buckeye team at home. ESPN is in Evanston. ABC national television is in Evanston. Approximately 95,000 Ohio State fans are in Evanston to take over the stadium and shame Northwestern on said national television. The capital of the Greater Football-Land Metropolitan Area is Evanston, Illinois, and this time it is not because they are playing a game in a one-endzone geek show against the Last Days of the Zook Empire. Stock up on bleach.

URBAN JUSTICE

All of the carnival hoopla surrounding this game can only mask the fact that Northwestern has to play Ohio State. Two weeks ago, Ohio State demolished Florida A&M by a score of 222-0. At the same time, the Wildcats sputtered against an unacceptably frisky Maine team, only pulling away in the second half. One of the problems of increased expectations for Northwestern is a concern about how it beats teams. While Wildcat fans would traditionally take any win against any opponent, even if it came weeks later on a technicality due to some bureaucratic error that mislabeled the score, now fans are concerned that they are not pummeling FCS opponents enough.

Meanwhile, Ohio State has maintained its position at the top of the Big Ten pecking order. They defeated Wisconsin handily without having to resort to any clock-confusing wizardry. Superstar quarterback Braxton Miller missed two games and his replacement, Kenny Guiton, threw dozens of touchdowns against nonconference opponents without a second thought. Miller is expected to be the quarterback against Northwestern because Urban Meyer has not realized the winning football strategy of using as many quarterbacks as humanly possible all of the time.

Historically, Northwestern has faltered against Ohio State. They've beaten them once since 1971, when Brett Basanez and Noah Herron led a stirring overtime comeback. This game has led to the importance of the number 33 in Wildcat numerology: Herron, wearing #33, scored the games decisive 33rd point with his 33rd carry, and I also saw a drunken bar patron menace close to 33 people with a bar stool after the game was over.

Noah Herron temporarily ends the Buckeyes' reign of terror against Northwestern football

The 'Cats open this game as home underdogs. In a spot of good news, Venric Mark will play for the first time since a brief cameo in the opener. The addition of a dynamic playmaker will only help the offense, which struggled against Maine. Nevertheless, Northwestern faces hurdles. The pass defense will be tested. They will need to take advantage of turnovers. And they should possibly look into some type of subterfuge such as convincing the Buckeye coaching staff that the Wrigley Rules are still in effect from Gameday and they are barred from any use of the south endzone for any reason including touchdowns, touchdown dances, safeties, touchbacks, team-building exercises, and general Big Ten expansion talks.

FOOTBALL APOCALYPSE

In the meantime, you have from now until Saturday evening to prepare yourself for the momentous, exhilarating, terrifying prospect of a football apocalypse. The United States government has shut down in preparation. There are no longer any laws in the United States. You can go to Columbus with a crew of several thousand and crane equipment, steal Buckeye Stadium, remove it to a vacant lot, and leave threatening messages on Brutus Buckeye's voicemail account because there is no one left to stop you. The Big Ten can add as many teams as it likes without consequence and no one can prevent Jim Delany from walking around with a cape. The game will have no referees except for the angry fake Mayan guys from Legends of the Hidden Temple who will pop out of the locker room and attempt to startle players in false start situations.

THIS IS NOW YOUR PRESIDENT, AMERICA

Stock up on canned goods, water, and Wildcat Hats. Gameday is coming. And, on Sunday, when the dust has cleared from Ryan Field, when nothing remains of the braying fans, when expired sausage products disintegrate in the parking lot, Northwestern will have won or lost a football game, and this means something.

Have you spent the off-season resting? Have watched the Wildcats without couch seatbelts or bleacher restraints? Have you enjoyed a relatively non-taxing non-conference schedule spending all of your leisure hours longing about in lawn furniture, reading historical fiction, and faxing hat-threats to Tim Beckman's office? Well, dust off your gameday defibrillators, friends, because this is the Big Ten schedule and Northwestern football wants to make orphans of your children.

Kudos to Northwestern fans for making the ESPN Gameday atmosphere appropriately apocalyptic. Fans toted signs alluding to libraries, making ESPN acrostics with sculpted Ns, and paying proper tribute to Slab SquatThrust and an unidentified Tecmo Super Bowl player who I will assume is Willie "Flipper" Anderson. Even the stands seemed to be more than 50% purple-- this still doesn't look great on television, but there is essentially nothing the school can do to shut out Big Ten fanbases with more alumni in the Chicago area than Northwestern short of coming up with some sort of Voight-Kampff test to identify Ohio State fans as part of the ticket purchasing process.

Buckeye fans are detected by the amount of suppressed outrage they display when
shown photographs of Brett Basanez

Nevertheless, despite harping on the five minutes and three seconds that separated the 'Cats from a perfect record last season, we saw the same game haunting game. The lead evaporated, Kain Colter came either inches from that fourth-down conversion or was victimized by an inaccurate spot, and Brutus the Buckeye left Evanston with his stupid, google-eyed, oval head held high.

DO WE GET TO HAVE MORAL VICTORIES ANYMORE

Despite weathering another close, painful loss, Northwestern played the class of the Big Ten well. Mark was dangerous in the option game, and both Colter and Siemian found receivers. Rashad Lawrence caught eight balls for 149 yards. The Wildcats' maligned pass defense held a Heisman candidate to a pedestrian-for-him 226 yards. Northwestern acquitted itself well as the Capital of Football. Unfortunately, the 'Cats had no answers for Ron Dayne impersonator Carlos Hyde, who smashed through the Northwestern defense like a human battering ram.

A stolen page from Urban Meyer's playbook taken when he left his
baggage train unguarded. Reports that hte playbook includes
siege towers and sapping methods banned by the NCAA remain
unproven unless the Northwestern Athletic Department can
successfully bribe an Ohio State courtier

But is it enough anymore for Northwestern fans to hang with a national championship contender? Some already have been distraught that the 'Cats were merely beating non-conference opponents instead of treating opponents to the three-part Conan the Barbarian enemy-crushing system.

Professional Barbarians Hate Him! Click here to see this ONE CRAZY TRICK that
has destroyed an enemy's farming infrastructure

The loss stings because for once, there did not seem to be a canyon of football talent separating both teams. Northwestern outplayed Ohio State for much of the game. We were all very close to jubilantly rushing the field again as Pat Fitzgerald's fists grew three sizes, and we were very close to doing the most damage to the civic identity of Columbus, Ohio short of flooding their city with aggressive Leif Ericson impersonators.

On the other hand, playing Ohio State close has not done anything to harm Northwestern's reputation. They are still ranked in the top twenty in both the AP and USA Today polls, and they look as good as their somewhat lackadaisical competition in the LEGENDS division-- it is entirely possible that we can see a rematch in Indianapolis, or more accurately most of us may see a rematch because we're not all going to make it out of the Dreaded Fourth Quarter alive.

BUCK UP

Right now, the Road to Indianapolis is blocked by angry badgers. Wisconsin enjoyed their own bye week after losing to Ohio State, but are another formidable Big Ten team. I have heard rumors that the Badgers graduated some players, gained others, and have a new coach, but Wisconsin football is an eternal constant. Every year, the head coach draws from their secret list of the World's Hugest Persons, plants them on an offensive line, and Ron Daynes at defenses until the sun ceases to burn and Earth becomes a lifeless husk scrubbed clean of any evidence of human existence except for some ruts created by a Wisconsin tackle.

Wisconsin has an attorney on the sidelines who legally changes running backs'
names to Ron Dayne as they enter and exit the huddle for ease of continuity

This game has less fanfare and excitement than last week, but it's no hangover. The 'Cats will be traveling to Madison, which is in a perennial state of Football Apocalypse every Saturday, with its Camp Randall Thunderdome, its State Street bartertown, and a captive audience of thousands forced to jump on command to appease their evil overlord, Everlast.

Wisconsin also fancies itself a contender for the Big Ten crown, and will be fighting hard to avoid starting conference play in a 1-2 hole. Northwestern risks losing its preseason buzz by faltering here before even starting LEGENDS division play against Minnesota next week. They need to recover from last week's media frenzy and heart-breaking let-down and prepare to enter a hostile environment devoid of thousands of fans carrying signs with encouraging messages such as "Everyone Sports Purple Neckties" or "Excelsior! Sports-Play, Now!"

CUBS MANAGER SEARCH '13

We're deep into October, which means that the Cubs have safely finished their exhibition of fruitless baseballing and have repaired to their homes so they could engage in deep studies about how to more effectively manufacture outs, serve up meatballs, and festively collide into one another in the outfield. The Cubs' season went as expected, with Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer all but declaring the season a lost cause from the outset. Still, there were moments of progress: Anthony Rizzo looks like a serviceable first baseman, Carlos Villanueva sported an incredible mustache for a substantial portion of the season, and we all got to be unreasonably excited about Junior Lake for a couple of weeks. Future Superstar Starlin Castro celebrated his first year of a large contract with an impression of a professional baseball player roughly on par with my impressions of Daniel Dravot, Peachy Carnahan, and the super-plummy Indian Civil Service agent in the "Hats On!" scene from the Man Who Would Be King, by which I mean it required someone to find an antique shop to remove him with an actual vaudeville hook.

The Cubs' strategy was simple: to let young players take their lumps and to trade any veteran who showed even a scrap of ability. The sell-off included a rejuvenated Scott Feldman to Baltimore, the Carlos Marmol Experience to L.A. (where he has just been called up to the NLCS because I guess Don Mattingly wants to terrify St. Louis batters with the threat of poorly aimed fastballs colliding with their torsos), and Alfonso Soriano, who went to the Yankees and immediately mashed eight home runs every game. In addition, the Cubs jettisoned speedster Tony Campana, human being Brent Lillibridge, platoon man Scott Hairston, and other players for fan favorites such as Cash Considerations and International Bonus Slot Money.

The result was a parade of pitchers from various minor league organizations, interchangeable banjo-hitting infielders, and mystery players who seemed to drift ephemerally between Iowa, Chicago, and a ghostly spiritual plane. The Cubs lost 96 games, though they managed to finish ahead of other hapless punching bags like Houston, Miami, and the White Sox, which replaced their broadcasts with two and a half hours of of Hawk Harrelson G-rated profanities sometime in mid-August.

Dale Sveum was put in charge of this hapless venture. He had no chance of succeeding with the club, but nevertheless got the axe after his second season at the helm. I'm not sure why he was let go-- by August, my ability to stomach the Cubs dwindled and they existed for me as the occasional highlight reel that consistently showed Jeff Samardzija getting shelled and then walking to the dugout like a sad Musketeer. It seems as though Sveum was expected to lose, but was not losing with enough style or panache for the Cubs front office.

Perhaps they let him ago because they got sucked into the web of Joe Girardi intrigue, hoping to lure Chicago's Big Ten Professional Baseball Manager back home by promising him season tickets to Wildcat football games and cut privileges at the bouncy castle in Wildcat Alley. Nevertheless, Cubs fans can expect another several season of futility until the balley-hooed prospects are ready to take their place on the major league team and promptly forget how to get on base, drop easy fly balls, and have their pitching arms explode into a confetti of tendons and sinew, taking their place as the proper heirs to Chicago Cubs baseball tradition.

EMERGE FROM YOUR FOOTBALL SHELTER, WILDCATS

Last week's game was a reminder that Northwestern football is exciting, thrilling, and almost certainly fatal. The Wildcats played well against a team in the mix for a national championship. The offense with Mark is back to ludicrous speed, the defense stepped up against a dangerous attack, and the 'Cats did enough to win. 'Cats fans, however, will not be satisfied with a moral victory at Wisconsin. Northwestern needs a win, and I would take an immoral victory achieved by the Wildcats by finding a Gary Andersen doppelganger and having him instruct his players to punt on first down, attempt four to five dangerous laterals on every play, and leave the game in the middle of the second half because he received news on his headset of trouble at the old mill.

Beware to those who fail to heed former Northwestern head coach/football sage Dennis Green's words about premature ass-crowning. We came into the season with the most ambitious expectations on the program in years, with dreams of Indianapolis. We shrugged off injuries to Mark and Colter and Jones and McEvilly and shaky play against a less-than-terrifying non-conference schedule. We exchanged knowing looks as Michigan and Nebraska looked less than ept. We were heartened by a heart-breakingly close loss to Big Ten standard-bearer Ohio State-- I will go to my grave believing that Colter got that first down, and I intend to produce a number of shoddily-edited, wild-haired internet videos to convince the world that football spotting was an inside job.

Former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura delves into the labyrinthine conspiracy
that cost Northwestern a crucial first down against the Ohio State Buckeyes that
involves cover-ups at the highest levels of college sports. His theories also explain
the mysterious disappearance of Captain Freedom

Now, of course, we're considerably deflated. The Wildcats sputtered on offense against Wisconsin, and its defensive line was treated like the USC Marching Band treated Ricardo Montalban in The Naked Gun. Then, they were defeated by a mediocre, coachless Minnesota team. I'm not an expert on football, but I'm pretty sure that it's not a good sign for a potential contender when the opposing team's interim coach has moved down to the sidelines for the first time in a decade and therefore spent the game in what the ESPN sideline reporters convinced me was an anti-social anxiety bubble. Kudos to the Gophers and their young quarterbacks for overdosing on moxie and pulling out a victory on the road under those circumstances. I invite them to run me over with their truck.

AN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

The last time I can remember that the 'Cats came into the season with such lofty expectations was in 2001. Northwestern had just come out of nowhere with an unexpected Big Ten Championship season which was sponsored by utter insanity-- it featured the hail mary and 54-51 in back-to-back weeks and then we all watched dreams of Pasadena evaporate on the cruel fields of Kinnick.

Kirk Ferentz celebrates the Hawkyes' defeat of a Rose Bowl-bound Northwestern
team

Northwestern came into 2000 returning much of that team, including Zak Kustok and Damian Anderson. Like this year's team, they started 4-0, and Kustok even began to get some vague Heisman rumblings after Victory Righting Michigan State. Then, the season fell apart. The Wildcats lost every single game, except a rainy homecoming contest against the Gophers. That included a 56-21 drubbing against a terrible Indiana team led by Antwaan Randle-El, who played every single position simultaneously.

In a typical series, Randle-El passes to Randle-El, who runs it in for a touchdown,
signaled by Randle-El. This is an archaic series of events. If this game happened
today, Randle-El would also review the touchdown in the replay booth, pausing
for a commercial on the Big Ten Network in which Antwaan Randle-El would
inform discerning consumers about the benefits of Rotel or various diesel-powered
farm implements

Northwestern's season seems fairly hopeless right now. The devastating Colter/Mark option has been shelved as Mark recovers from vague injuries guarded like nuclear secrets. Colter has been in and out of games, and the Northwestern offense has stalled without both of them out there. The defense has also struggled as the recipe for Wildcat victories has gone from outscoring teams to beating them in punting exhibitions. The 'Cats offensive playbook has been replaced with the bleak, existential novels of Camus. The 'Cats are fighting desperately not to repeat that particular historical event.

Another classic Northwestern historical maxim is to never follow Napoleon
Harris into Russia, Ohio.

HAT IMPLICATIONS

Yet, with Big Ten championships and Rose Bowls and other pipe dreams seemingly off the table, it is time to focus on what really matters: retaining control of the Hat. No one has enjoyed Northwestern's struggles this season more than Tim Beckman, who has been watching game film late at night on his throne made of hats and cackling into his Bugles. While the Wildcats have sputtered, Illinois looks far better than preseason prognostications. Granted, most Big Ten watchers assumed that Illinois would be so wretched that they would cease playing football by the end of the season and send their basketball, tennis, intramural floor hockey, dressage, and University Challenge teams to try to win football games. Instead, the Beck Men are a respectable 3-3, they blew out Cincinnati, and they are Scheelhaasing people with alarming frequency.

In the meantime, the Hat seems more attainable. Beckman has forbidden his players from wearing non-helmet hats; he has a giant no hat sign in the Illini locker room to prevent premature hat-hubris; a general Beckman Alert has been issued to all Lincoln impersonators in the general Springfield area. This is a dangerous situation. I'm declaring this a Hat or Bust season: I no longer care what happens to Northwestern football as long as Tim Beckman does not traipse across Memorial Stadium with a hat trophy.

Beckman gets dangerously confident about his chances in the
Illinois-Northwestern game this season

TAKE ME DOWN TO THE PIZZA CITY

Indianapolis, Big Ten Championships, Pasadena are all glittering false oases. Northwestern football once again finds itself in a comfortable place-- a hard-scrabble battle against the LEGENDS DIVISION for six wins and a berth in some sort of Pizza City Bowl. It's time to adjust ourselves to that. Winnable games, like this week in Iowa, seem less winnable. Every game has Pizza City Implications.

Northwestern has been to five consecutive bowl games. They have a bowl win streak of one. Yes, the season may be disappointing thus far. And yes, Northwestern may still reverse course, pull off an improbable run to the end of the season, and these losses may appear as an embarrassing blip on a triumphant march towards a championship. But it is more than likely that Northwestern will continue to fight for a bowl berth in a wretched Pizza City location, and we can hope that a healthy Northwestern team will rise up and throttle an opponent from whatever conference has been hastily thrown together in the last eight months or whatever down-on-its luck BCS conference opponent or intramural or dental college team that a group of corrupt, pocket-lining, dinner-jacketed bowl conference representatives can throw at them, because this is Northwestern football, and there is a bowl win streak on the line.

A HIGHLY SCIENTIFIC BREAKDOWN OF THE MATCHUP WITH IOWA, CONSIDERING VARIABLES SUCH AS OFFENSIVE AND DEFENSIVE SCHEMES, STATISTICS, COACHING PHILOSOPHIES, AND HISTORY

Oh fuck. Get out of Kinnick alive.

DON'T DESPAIR, IT'S STILL FOOTBALL SEASON

Why do we watch Northwestern football? What is the endgame? Maybe it is because we enjoy watching young adults smash into each other. Maybe it is because we are surrounded by embarrassing and inadequate fist pumpers. Maybe it is because, with all of the horrifying revelations about the long-term health implications of football, we are looking forward to being looked upon as savage blood-sport enthusiasts by our grandchildren who will treat us like so many Ernest Hemingways or confused Kumite bettors. It is certainly not because we root for a program that has been traditionally wreathed in glory or is a perennial national championship contender.

There can only be only one team to come out of the LEGENDS division each season, and by 2015, the Big Ten will have 46 teams and a six round playoff structure. The odds are, many years Northwestern won't be in Indianapolis. Even with the Wildcats' incredible and fun resurgence, there will be years when they will scrap and claw for a wretched bowl berth, and there may even be years when they fall short of that. But I'm not about to let that get in the way of spending three hours during football season yelling at people on television, playing out hypothetical bowl eligibility formulae, and writing and then deleting things about Brian Griese that would otherwise put me on some sort of FBI watch list because he is bad at talking about football. And, most importantly, there is a hat at stake every year, which I am determined to care about.

We should have seen this coming. All of the preseason hype, all of the accolades, all the sweet dreams of the Kolter-Mark option (which sounds like an exotic financial implement that could short-circuit the United States economy), all of the rankings. It has all come crashing down like a proverbial House of Cards, by which I mean Pat Fitzgerald is now inexplicably talking with an absurd southern accent and delivering fourth-wall breaking asides about Purdue to a camera that isn't there.

Kevin Spacey sounds so much like a Shelby Foote impersonator that I expect him
to threaten to bring hellfire on someone's district then turn to the camera and
start talking about Beauregard

Last week, Northwestern faced a Nebraska team without its wobbly slingshot passing all-everything QB Taylor Martinez and looked like they could finally pull off a Big Ten win. Instead, with no time remaining, a ninth-string quarterback impossibly named "Ron Kellogg III" lofted a ball in the endzone at a Northwestern defender who improbably tipped into the waiting hands of a Nebraska receiver in a play known as Inconceivably Heartbreaking Defeat Right. At least that is what I am told. I did not see the play because I was busy gambling on jai alai, but at this point Northwestern football no longer has the ability to shock me.

Chi Chi Ariguzo's endzone collapse is a pretty decent summation of the season to date

Northwestern is 0-5 in the Big Ten and is desperately scrambling to make a bowl, any bowl. The 'Cats will play anyone, any time in December. They will play the fourth-place Sun Belt finisher in an abandoned tile warehouse? They will play the remaining UFL all-stars in a rendering plant. They will undergo some sort of Captain N process to play against the 1991 Los Angeles Raiders in a Tecmo Super Bowl. They could really use a win.

THE VICTORS

Northwestern hopes to avenge it's entire season by taking out a mediocre Michigan team on Saturday. Michigan, also touted as potential LEGENDS DIVISION contenders, is not having a great season by any stretch of the imagination. The Wolverines sit at 2-3 in the Big Ten and have yet to record a positive rushing total in the past two games. Fans, though, can be comforted that they have at least qualified for a bowl game that Michigan fans can haughtily look down their collective noses at.

Michigan's offensive woes have made this a winnable game for the ailing 'Cats. And even though a theoretical Northwestern victory has lost a lot of luster against the unranked Wolverines, it would still be vastly satisfying. One of the great pleasures of college football fandom is rooting not only against a current team but entire programs, fanbases, and civilizations. All Big Ten fans have been traumatized by Michigan and Ohio State for so long that you could put a winged helmet on Rocky Balboa and I'd be singing the Soviet National Anthem.

Of course, this would mean that Northwestern would have to pull out a victory at all. Last week, I speculated on twitter about some potentially devastating Northwestern loss scenarios for this season including deadly meteor strikes, vacating the 1995 Big Ten championship, and having a mass of Chicago-area Northwestern fans cause a large enough ruckus to force a forfeit. I've brainstormed a few more since then:

-Colter breaks away for game-winning touchdown but is tackled by the Visitor Section Tarp, which has escaped its moorings and is out for vengeance.
-All of Northwestern football turns out to be an elaborate long con from a family of grifters who wait for the 'Cats to be in winning field goal range before announcing that the game is over, disassembling the stadium, and selling it to be ground up and shipped as gravel as part of an art installation project.
-Northwestern wins a game in dramatic fashion, but does so to the advantage of Biff Tannen, who has traveled back in time, wagered heavily on the 'Cats, and immediately forces us all to live in a post-apocalyptic Biff Town.
-A Soviet sleeper agent alters Northwestern's super-patriotic flag uniforms to hypercolor fabrics that reveal pictures of Lenin when exposed to sweat and moisture. The game is forefeited when a riot breaks out led by the surviving relatives of Apollo Creed and professional wrestlers from the 1980s.

Northwestern's uniforms have created a Patriotic Singularity

LET US WIN A BIG TEN GAME

The Wildcats are certainly hungry for a victory. They will be without Venric Mark the rest of the season and have a fairly banged up with emerging threat Stephen Buckley also injured. It has been a rough season for the 'Cats, but a victory here would still keep them in bowl contention and give some much-needed stakes to the Hat Game. Buck up, Northwestern fans. The 'Cats have been alternately maddening, depressing, and shocking, but never boring, and they can use your fist claws this afternoon.

How is this possible?

Michigan players dashed into action. They vaulted over benches and spun around sideline personnel. The holder came sliding in like a Beastie Boy navigating a car hood in the Sabotage video. And the kick went up with less than one second preventing a Northwestern Big Ten victory, the longest second that has occurred since human beings invented the idea of measuring time.

Fuck.

Northwestern has had bad seasons. The entire Northwestern experience is wrapped in those bad experiences. Even if you were not alive when the Wildcats lost 267 consecutive games by 800 points apiece, were (possibly apocryphally) defeated by Interstate 94, and began each game by hastily reviewing the rules of football that players had put off learning because of the accelerated pace of midterm exams due to the quarter system, the history of crappy Northwestern football is imbued into your brain as a Northwestern fan. You may not have chanted "we are the worst" or participated in an aquatic grow-a-goalpost experiment, but your collective fan memory has. Northwestern's historical crappiness is the foundation of the Northwestern football narrative. The 'Cats were bad. They were the worst. Dennis Green. Then they were surprisingly good and lost the Rose Bowl. And now they are fine.

But there's a difference between the outright historical futility of Northwestern football and whatever the hell is going on. You could secure a grant, hire a dozen football chaos theoreticians of both bearded and non-bearded variety, put them into a lab with a simulated Ryan Field and moveable Northwestern figurines, and a Pat Fitzgerald action figure with Kung-Fu Fist Pump Action, and 50,000 simulated Nebraska fans, and I'm not quite sure they could invent the ways that Northwestern has lost so far.

Northwestern might win by a field goal or a butterfly flaps its wings on Deering
Meadow and, ah, the other team runs 45 consecutive laterals with no time
remaining and are stopped on the one-yard line, but get the chance to sneak it in
because the referees have discovered a loophole left over from the nineteenth
century that penalizes Fitzgerald for not having a festive boater hat and insulting
the game with his bare-headed impudence and then the game ends and Ryan Field
spontaneously bursts into flames MUST GO FASTER

Northwestern came into this season with so much promise and hype. Then, the season has been derailed by offensive woes and the disappearance of Venric Mark into the Springfield Mystery Spot. There is no joy. There is no hope. Football is despair, misery, and, to be honest, kind of darkly funny at this point because it should not be possible to keep losing games like this unless they are making weekly appearances in inspirational sports movies as the opponents in the last game of the season.

POTENTIAL ANTI-NORTHWESTERN FOOTBALL CONSPIRACIES

Northwestern lost to Michigan in an absurdly heart-breaking manner on Saturday. It is clear at this point that it is not just bad luck and poor late-game coaching and execution that is dooming the 'Cats. Instead, it must be all part of some sort of nefarious anti-Northwestern plot concocted by dark forces beyond our comprehension. A brief survey of potential plotters:

The Soviet Union
Northwestern deployed its America Uniforms in order to America its opponent last Saturday. The mainstream media wants you to believe that the Soviet Union dissolved in late 1991. But its clear that the Soviet government has remained operating in secret since then, plotting Soviet revenge and churning out Soviet documents in a shadowy reverse samizdat process. It's also clear that the Northwestern uniforms from last week were a provocation that could no longer be ignored. Let's be clear: for legal reasons, I am not alleging that the Michigan special teams unit is made up of Soviet sleeper agents who are identified by discreet Ivan Drago tattoos, that they met in secret before the game to sing the Soviet national anthem, and then they unfurled a giant poster of the guy who used to wrestle professionally in Soviet underpants. I'm just asking questions.

The Bohemian Grove
Long thought by conspiracy theorists to be a gathering by various global elites for secret meetings to consolidate their power and perform bizarre rituals, the Bohemian Grove has recently been revealed to be site where global elites gather to destroy Northwestern football. Insider sources tell BYCTOM that the Grove visitors enjoy acting out failed Northwestern offensive remade into light operettas, having hundreds of pizzas delivered to the Fitzgerald residence before big games, and somehow manipulate global economic systems and politics to a pinpoint degree to affect football recruiting, weather conditions, officiating, and the rules of football that will somehow end in a Northwestern loss because of a minor fluctuation in the stock price of a Swiss hedge fund.

Former Head Basketball Coach Bill Carmody
Carmody attempted to take the 'Cats to the dance for more than a decade. Earlier this year, he saw the football team's ignominious bowl record shattered in a glorious Gator Bowl victory. A few months later, he was fired. Shortly after, Carmody disappeared. Some say he has moved on from Northwestern as a sought-after guru of the Princeton Offense. Others say he has moved into the tunnel system underneath the university, wearing a mask for some reason, and is determined to never let the football team steal his glory again. Carmody and his shadowy operatives drawn from the former Yugoslavia have furtively followed the football team, they've divulged the meaning of those weird offense signal signs to opposing defensive coordinators, greased Northwestern footballs, and replaced one of the referees for the Ohio State game with a man named "Milos Fourthdownavic."

Calves' Head Club
A secret society devoted to mocking the death of Charles I through various food items: a cod's head to symbolize the beheaded king, a pike representing tyranny, boars' heads because Charles preyed on his subjects, and calves' heads representing Charles and his supporters. Maybe it's my twenty-first century manners poking through, but that dinner is really heavy on heads. The Calves' Head Club was broken up by an angry mob in 1734. Now, they meet to make fun of Northwestern's terrible season. They eat tiny frankfurters cut into four by one inch pieces to commemorate the Ohio State game, a bowl of corn flakes to celebrate the hail mary by Ron Kellogg III, and then they rub themselves in pig entrails to represent the Michigan game.

Tim Beck Man, Head Coach, University of Illinois Football
Sometimes, you make an elaborate cork board to trace the various ways that various shadowy organizations have it in for the Wildcats. And sometimes you think about who benefits the most and all becomes clear. Tim Beckman is sabotaging Northwestern football because he wants the Hat. Last year, the 'Cats humiliated his Illini and left him miserable and hatless in the cold. This year, he has pulled no punches. I am confident that Beckman has assembled a coterie of the nation's most deranged Lincoln impersonators to help him pull a series of daring wrecking operations to destroy Northwestern's morale before the Hat Game by convincing them that the Hat should be closer to Springfield. Beckman has stopped at nothing. He has disguised himself as Northwestern equipment managers and long-snappers, infiltrated the Wildcat video room, and replaced Big Ten chain gangs with clean-shaven Lincoln impersonators whose lack of beard allows them to roam amongst us undetected. Sure, this has not helped the Illini this season. They are equally winless in the Big Ten and Beckman nearly attacked his own offensive coordinator last week. But Tim Beckman doesn't think in terms of wins and losses or titles. He thinks in terms of hats and no hats, he has no sense of right and wrong, and he is determined to win the hat at all costs.

MICHIGAN STATE IS THIS WEEKEND

The grim season marches on as Northwestern is forced by some arcane, awful rule to play another football game on Saturday. Sure, it might be wearying to think of insane Rube Goldberg scenarios where Northwestern can let another one slip away. Instead, though, this is a significant opportunity. Michigan State are in the driver's seat of the LEGENDS Division, and no one on the planet think Northwestern can come out on top here. But this is just the opportunity for an improbable and absurd win. I fully expect Northwestern to hang in there all game and then, on the last possession, throw one victory right pass followed by 15 Reverse Victory Right backward passes and then weave their way to the endzone for America.

Keep the faith, 'Cats fans. Sometimes you win games, sometimes you lose games, and sometimes you lose games despite the fact that it should be impossible to lose them because of things like the physical laws of the universe. No matter what, the Wildcats continue to suit up and smash into other teams. The odds are against Northwestern. Clearly, unknown shadowy forces are against Northwestern. The Michigan State Spartans are definitely against Northwestern. As fans, though, we can do nothing less than support their effort, cheer on the seniors, and possibly die from emotional trauma.

HAT-- Hat!

Hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat. Hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat? Hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat; hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat! Hat-- hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat.

Hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat. Hat hat hat hat hat.

Hat hat hat hat?

Hat.

Hat.

Hat hat hat

Hat hat hat hat hat.

THE LAND OF LINCOLN TROPHY

It is Hat Week. Hide your valuables. Send your loved ones away.

Northwestern's season has come down to this. The Wildcats have not won a football game since September 21st. They will not be bowling. They have suffered a litany of football indignities too gruesome to describe on the way to a stunningly awful season. There is no hope. There is no redemption. There is only Hat.

Last week, Michigan State did something only few other teams have been able to do on a miserable, cold, windy day in Evanston (and lest you think it was not windy, I defy you to rewatch the game and count how many seconds it would take ESPN's ace announcing crew to refrain from talking about the wind. That's why Northwestern is Chicago's Big Ten team-- because the announcers will not stop talking about wind conditions). They decisively beat the Wildcats without having to resort to some bizarre, last-minute, physics-defying, deity-intervening play. The 'Cats moved the ball well on the Spartan defense in the first half, but the loss of Kain Colter to injury and some big offensive plays from Michigan State tipped the game in their favor, Northwestern lost, and now hat.

There is one indignity so wretched and one low that Northwestern has avoided so far: to lose The Hat to a woeful Illinois team coached by Beck Man. And that reduced this season to a single game.

I don't care that the 'Cats are not going to Indianapolis, and I don't care that they're not ranked, and I don't care that they have lost every game in an increasingly horrifying fashion that has convinced me that we are living in Homeric times and Pat Fitzgerald has accidentally started a petty feud with a lesser ancient Greek demigod who has decided to punish his fist-pumping hubris with a series of outlandish defeats. This season has been a waking nightmare, but these seasons happen and Northwestern will return to bowl contention. But I care deeply about the Hat and all hat-related ideas, and I refuse to see the Land of Lincoln trophy spirited away by that purple-hating, no Northwestern sign-having, "that school up north" referring, visor-wearing, sub-Zookian geek show from Champaign-Urbana.

THE HATFIELDS AND THE NO HATFIELDS

General Beckman was confident coming off his first conference victory at West Lafeyette. By the end, soldiers had written that he was at the end of his rope. He had in the past been reprimanded for sideline interference and the unauthorized use of mouth tobacco, so it was no surprise that he had attacked a subordinate with a spittoon. There's no evidence for this, but a rumor had started that said he had long, bleary-eyed late night conversations with a hat that he whittled.

Historians now believe Beckman's campaign was derailed by
his unceasing obsession with hat-vengeance

Letter from the front of Tim Beckman's War on Northwestern

November 25

Dear Mother,

It is cold. The lads were heartened by our victory in West Lafayette. We were far from home and the enemy had a train and a drum. Gen. Beck-Man had us return home and dig trenches around the hat. We are tired, we are strained, we have a losing record. One weary soldier has mentioned something about basketball season, and when Gen. Beck-Man heard about this, he said I'll show you a basketball and tried to dunk on an entrenched artillery piece. He has reprimanded us ordering the officers to violently rip hats off of our heads. They do this half-heartedly. I long to come home, but I suppose we may not until Gen. Beck-Man finally gets his hat or is fired out of a cannon.

M.F.B.

Beckman's men were exhausted. He had marched them day and night from Indiana, but refused to proceed in a Northern or Western direction because they didn't do that in his company. He had an officer plot out a route that included an Atlantic crossing and the Cape of Good Hope. Instead, the officers ceremonially renamed the directions "Chief" and "Dee Brown." Their compasses were artfully redesigned (chuckles softly to no one).

November 29

Dear Mother,

We are under constant watch. Some of us have begun to refer to Gen. Beck-Man as "Lord Stovepipe." He has taken our razors and made us wear long beards to look "more civil warry." Only one man has tried to desert, but he was found by J Leman and ceaselessly pelted with monocles. We have been building a giant Pat Fitzgerald out of straw and our unit must attack it each day and take the hat from its head. It is shoddily built, and has fallen on many good men. We dare not question or protest. We can only shout "Chicago's Big Ten Team," affix our bayonets, and hope that we avoid its flailing fists.

M.F.B.

HAT, NOW

This is the last game of the season. The Wildcats can salvage some hope against an equally downcast Illinois team or face a cold, hatless winter. Let us endure one more game, let us rally for The Hat, let us flood Memorial Stadium with our Lincoln regalia, let us spend the rest of our lives taunting our Illini friends and loved ones by wearing nothing but stovepipes in their vicinity, let us hope we have Tim Beckman to kick around for as many seasons as it takes to drive him into hat-madness.

Hat?

Hat.

Well, they got the hat.

Northwestern's football season was plagued by misfortune and we spent a horrifying winter without the relief of a soothing, crappy bowl game. But (and you know this because it happened apparently several months ago), the Wildcats somehow managed to outfox Beck Man, our Great Nemesis and retain possession of the most dapper football-related trophy in all of nineteenth-century fashion. Equally importantly, I am pretty sure I ended up on some sort of list after sending a barrage of demented hat-tweets directly to whoever runs Tim Beckman's twitter feed:

@coachbeckman IT WILL TAKE YOU FOUR SCORE AND SEVEN YEARS TO BRING FORTH A HAT FROM EVANSTON
— BYCTOM (@BYCTOM) November 29, 2013

@coachbeckman Instead of referring to NU as "that school up north" please refer to it as Hat Town, USA
— BYCTOM (@BYCTOM) November 29, 2013

@coachbeckman hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat hat ha
— BYCTOM (@BYCTOM) December 1, 2013

Though I received no official response to these sophisticated and elegant tweets to the Illini Athletic Department, I would like to think that Beckman spent the evening prank calling everyone in Illinois named George McLellan and then ordering an absurd amount of hats off an internet haberdashery to hoard in his home's hat annex.

Rumors swirled in the treacherous college football offseason that Beckman might get fired. Instead, the Illini will bring him and his absurd anti-Northwestern crusade back for another year because, according to highly-placed Illini sources, "someone playing up a football rivalry with Northwestern is the only thing we could think of that is funnier than Ron Zook." I have no idea what Beckman has planned for next year. For a small fee, however, I am officially making myself available to the University of Illinois to be their first Butkus Chair, Department of Northwestern Antagonism. Together, we will rent orange blimps to constantly hover over Evanston, dropping anti-Fitzgerald propaganda; we will deploy larger and more aggressive tarps at Memorial Stadium; we will petition to ban Harold and the Purple Crayon, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and The Color Purple from all University of Illinois-affiliated libraries; we will put up billboards that say "Illinois's Big Ten Team and In Case You Noticed, That Includes the Entire Chicagoland Metropolitan Area, Checkmate Motherfuckers."

Anti-Northwestern Propaganda Leaflet

Hat or no hat, Northwestern football is past a disappointing season, and fans can look towards next year. Venric Mark will return, along with several key players on defense. Kain Colter, however, will be moving on, but not before attempting to organize a union of football players. Colter and his supporters argue that football players are employees that should be allowed to collectively bargain with universities and challenge restrictions on transfers and loss of scholarships due to injury. The Northwestern administration argues that the players remain in the nebulous "student athlete" category who play in exchange for a free education unrelated to the millions generated by television deals, merchandise sales, and other piles of money generated by college athletics. After months of sophisticated legal analysis, the only way to resolve this is a strike by the nation's football players forcing university administrators to don helmets instead of canceling thousands of lucrative home games. College football analysts will hastily reorganize their preseason rankings based on whether you can run the wishbone effectively in full academic regalia, which dean gets to be quarterback, and which university has the meanest, most bone-crunching vice provost.

NORTHWESTERN BASKETBALL: EQUALLY BENIGHTED

What say you, Chris Collins? Last year, Northwestern fired long-time basketball head coach Bill Carmody. Carmody led the 'Cats to several NIT berths, but could never quite make it to the promised tournament. I prefer to think that the methodical Princeton offense secretly irritated the brass, with high-ranking Northwestern administrators throwing things at their television every time they saw a backdoor layup developing or an opposing player working his way through the 1-3-1 zone to brutally dunk on a hapless defender.

Chris Collins was brought in to try to mold the Wildcats into a tournament team. He brings youthful enthusiasm, a commitment to recruiting the Chicago area, and an association with the universally-loved Duke basketball program.

Chris Collins and Mike Krzyzewski are temporarily overwhelmed
by visiting fans' awe and respect for Duke basketball, America's
team

The transition to Chris Collins basketball has been bumpy. The 'Cats are dead last in the Big Ten. They will likely not play in a post-season tournament unless they somehow manage to win the Big Ten Tournament or every single other Big Ten team loses its eligibility because all of their players were replaced with doppelganger ringers that play professional basketball in the off-season in the secret European country that is ruled by Victor von Doom.

Despite these setbacks, there have been some positive things to take away from the season. We got a full season of Drew Crawford, who was injured most of last year. JerShon Cobb also returned to the team before succumbing to a broken foot. There was a brief period of time when Northwestern turned into a defensive juggernaut and somehow beat Wisconsin at the Kohl Center for the first time and a fairly bad Indiana team on the road, and Big Ten teams occasionally had to cope with becoming Tre Demps victims. Then they lost seven in a row, including one game where they scored 32 total points over 40 minutes of basketball.

Collins leads 'Cat Basketball into next season with some of his recruits joining the fold. Big man Alex Olah showed some flashes this season, and Sanjay Lumpkin returns to play some defense and provide a really fun name to yell at people getting dunked upon. No one expects Northwestern to crash the Dance any time soon, but that's part of being a Northwestern fan; anyone who is not prepared to die without seeing Northwestern lose the first match of an NCAA tournament, cheering the Cubs in the World Series, or proclaiming to a mortal enemy that you and me are not so different is setting him or herself up of a lifetime of cruel disappointments.

THE TOWN

The early Victorian scandalous press was a nest of innuendo, bawdy suggestion, extortion, and feuds. In other words, it was the best possible use of presses ever devised by human beings. Donald J. Gray's "Early Victorian Scandalous Journalism: Renton Nicholson's The Town (1837-1842)" is available in the Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff-edited collection of scholarly articles The Victorian Press: Samplings and Soundings, and it's a pretty good way to spend a half-hour. Gray's study of The Town, a relatively cheap periodical that traded on scandal and innuendo,offers a number of trenchant insights into the early Victorian press, the transmission of ideas about social class amongst its working and lower-middle class readers, and how Victorian scandal challenges and reinforces scholarly understanding of Victorian mores in the 1830s and 40s. Instead, however, BYCTOM will pillage this wonderful article for bawdy anecdotes and strip them of context and analysis for cheap laughs because this is a dumb internet blog about a football team.

Gray discusses The Town, as well as other scandalous periodicals including The Age, John Bull, and The Satirist. John Bull initially targeted Queen Caroline, an enemy of her estranged husband, George IV. George, a bloated, pickled, raffish king was repeatedly thwarted by his father's recoveries from mental illness and stubborn refusal to die. He hated Caroline and attempted to divorce her using legislation based on allegations of infidelity (though George himself had been secretly and illegally married to a Catholic woman, Maria Fitzherbert). The bill did not pass and the marriage remained a fraught battlefield. As Gray relates, John Bull fanned the flames of her alleged affair, describing her as "mixed up with a disgraceful and criminal affection for a menial servant." After the Queen's death in 1821, John Bull transitioned into a milder, less scandal-driven publication to my personal dismay.

George IV had the unfortunate luck to live at the same time as British cartoonist
George Cruikshank, who delighted in drawing the despised, spherical monarch.
Here, Cruikshank demonstrates how George successfully fended off radical
petitioners by becoming more buttocks than man

The Age, The Satirist, and The Town were all reliable factories of spectacular Victorian vitriol. The Age, for example, dismissed the renowned essayist William Hazlitt as "Bill Pimple,""an old weather-beaten, pimple-snouted, gin-smelling man, like a Pimlico tailor, with ink-dyed hands, a corrugated forehead, and a spirituous nose." Yet, this gossip was not only directed at literary lions or axe-grinding aristocrats. The columns were filled with gossip about less luminous figures. Those who wished to avoid a public humiliation about unthinkable indiscretions such as young women asking a man to dance could scrub the record for a modest fee. Gray describes this kind of blackmail as an important revenue stream for these publications.

Gray's article, however, focuses mainly on The Town and its founder, Renton Nicholson. Nicholson, a self-styled baron (invariably the best kind of baron), was a colorful figure who gained fame in the 1840s for holding mock trials satirizing infamous divorce cases. Warrick Wroth, the author of a 1907 book called Cremorne and the Later London Gardens, described Nicholson as "a man who knew a thing or two" who had acquired a "remarkable knowledge of the 'flash life' of London in all its grades."

"After a minor experience of gambling-houses and doubtful premises of various
kinds, he became (in 1841) proprietor of the Garrick’s Head in Bow Street, and here,
in a room holding about 300 people, and fitted up like a law-court, he presided—as
Lord Chief Baron Nicholson—over the judge and jury trials that were so attractive to
the Londoner of the forties and fifties. The causes that came before this tribunal
were chiefly matrimonial—the crim. con. cases of the time—and were such that
their obscenity and heartlessness (mitigated, it is true, by flashes of wit) often made
the most hardened sinner shudder." Quotation and illustration from Warrick Wroth,
Cremorne and the Later London Gardens

The Town was a monument to the seedy underbelly of the Victorian press. It allowed Nicholson to attack his enemies. In the late 1830s, he feuded with Barnard Gregory, the editor of The Age, whom he described as "a common extortioner, gaming-house keeper, and brothel spongee." It contained bawdiness. As Gray relates, "Often the Town was simply coarse in its unrelenting play on words like 'work,''thing,''getting up the linen,''working under the butler,' and [Prince] Albert's German sausage again (and again)." More importantly, the Town, which avoided the official stamp duties and sold for a fraction of the cost of its rival publications, served as an instruction manual for its working and lower-middle-class readers with raffish aspirations. Gray describes Nicholson's Town as "something of an enormous guide through a loose and well-populated network of places to drink, eat, smoke, sing, gamble, flirt with pretty women, and meet women of the town..."

Alas, this golden age of scandalous journalism eventually was ground under the heel of Victorian moralism. By the 1850s, the Town and its ilk became unfashionable, with proprietors open to libel suits and obscenity laws. This had to be greatly disappointing to right-thinking people who needed clumsy double-entendres, fist-shaking vitriol, insinuations of social gaffes that are baffling in the twenty-first century, and descriptions of badger-baiting accidents or pheasant hunting chicanery. According to Gray, imitators did spring up with incredible names like Sam Sly-- or, The Town; Paul Pry; Fast Life; Cheap John; and Peeping Tom. I'm not entirely sure that Fast Life, Cheap John, and Peeping Tom are not currently the names of a Morning Zoo radio crew on Z108.5 GUYS, AM I RIGHT?

Perhaps, though, there is nothing more useful I can do than to leave you with the opening paragraph of Renton Nicholson's autobiography, which is how I should start all BYCTOM posts:

Exquisite reader, I have a right to believe you perfection. Let me shake hands with you at starting, for we are bound to travel together in sunlight and in shade, in lively day and dismal night-time; through narrow, devious passages and the mansions of wealth; with Lazarus and with Dives; o'er flowery meads and banks of wild roses; through cities, towns, and hamlets, where humanity dwells 'mid innocence and corruption, where base metal contrasts with unalloyed gold.

SPRING FORWARD

Exquisite reader, I have the right to believe you have wasted time and are now considerably misinformed about scandalous publications and Northwestern men's revenue sports. Let us make fist-claws with you starting, for we are bound to travel in sunlight and in shade, in lively wins and dismal losses, through Wildcat alleys and Welsh-Ryan arenas; with Fitzes and with Collinses; o'er Victory Rights and wild option pitches, through Pizza cities, pizza towns, and pizza hamlets, where humanity sits 'mid legends and leaders, where base helmets contrast with unalloyed hat.

Spring training is winding to a close. The baseball season started last weekend as the Dodgers and Diamondbacks opened play to a crowd of dozens of puzzled Australians who were not told that baseball is about throwing things at people's heads and delivering Shakespearean vengeance soliloquies about swimming pools.

But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What swims he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Gibson the King, McGwire and Mattingly,
Puig and Kershaw, Montero and Trammel-
Be in their flowing pools freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;

The rest of baseballdom continues in its lolling Spring Training doldrums as prospects in high digit uniforms anonymously plug away against pitchers that have not yet destroyed their arm ligaments. This includes the 2014 Chicago Cubs, where anonymous players and futility will continue over the course of 162 meaningless games, most of them losses, by design.

The 2014 Cubs are a postapocalyptic shanty town of a baseball team. There are few players that we can expect to see contribute to the Hypothetical Future Cubs that wins more than 80 games, and any that show any semblance of value will be shipped out and sold for scraps: younger players referred to as "lottery tickets" by baseball bloggers, players to be named later, and the fan favorite Cash Considerations. Only Anthony Rizzo, Welington Castillo, and (for some reason) Starlin Castro will be on the oil tanker when the Cubs ditch the rest of the team and are pursued by the motorcycle-riding, mohawked chap enthusiasts that make up the rest of NL Central in this overwrought Mad Max: The Road Warrior analogy.

I'm one Road Warrior shy of having each dude be a representative of an NL Central opponent, but
we can all agree that the jovial fat guy with the jaunty cap is a murderous Bernie Brewer

The Cubs will continue to lose, and fans are all aware that this is part of the master plan devised by the Cubs Brains Trust. We're all waiting for Albert Almora, Javier Baez, Kris Bryant, and Jorge Soler to be ready for the majors, and, in the meantime, the Cubs are going to play terrible baseball to allow them to draft the next Kris Bryants and Albert Almoras. Nothing the Cubs do this season matters. Ownership has magnanimously deigned to increase ticket prices, which according to some estimates are the third highest in baseball. And you can't even drown your sorrows in Old Style anymore, which will no longer be sold in the ballpark for absurd prices. This makes no sense because paying north of seven dollars for an Old Style is the exact beer equivalent of paying actual American currency to watch whatever it is Starlin Castro does when he flails futilely at baseballs or throws them at cracker jack vendors he has temporarily confused with Anthony Rizzo because they are both wearing hats.

The Cubs are selling hope and that is all well and good. Major League baseball rewards managers approaching their teams the way the Russian army approached the advancing forces of Napoleon. Free agents are harder to come by, draft slot money is enforced draconically, and the lawless dollar showers in the international market have been limited to the benefit of parsimonious owners. But it's a false hope. There is no guarantee that Bryant, Almora, Soler, and Baez will anchor the Hypothetical Future Winning Cubs-- the analytics movement has been clamping down on nonsense hokum like curses and clutch hitting and "Mickey Mantle" (a fictional baseball player invented in 1987 by Billy Crystal and Bob Costas), but I have no doubt that we can count on Four Separate Misfortunes to prevent any of them from being useful players as the Cubs will remain mired in purgatory for the rest of our short, miserable lives.

Felix Pie found himself in the Wrigleyville Mystery Spot, also known as Baltimore

It is tough to root for the Cubs this season. College sports, for all the hypocrisy, exploitation, money-grubbing, and general sanctimonious bullshit they nourish, at least do not have a framework that rewards losing. At the depths of Northwestern's futility, when it seemed unlikely for them to win a Big Ten game unless they convinced a team to forfeit by constructing a counterfeit Dyche Stadium dozens of miles away surrounded by a Potemkin Evanston, at least they'd give it their all. The Cubs are intentionally terrible, and their awfulness will likely not lead to a World Series. Yet, me and thousands of other dupes will continue to watch because baseball is as good of a waste of time as mankind has invented, and the Cubs have really sharp uniforms. Here are some reasons why we can manage to suck it up and deal with Cubs baseball this year:

-Someone named "Rick Renteria" has been named the new manager, and I'm sure he will do all sorts of exciting managery things like point to his left arm and scowl. The one hit I got for a google search for "rick renteria ejected" leads to an mlb.com article about how he got tossed as Padres first base coach for "engaging in a discussion" with an umpire. This is pretty uninspired, and I'd prefer that any manager is at the very least a 7-Piniella Scale lunatic who is willing to use his bulbous belly as an umpire-seeking missile (in case you were wondering, Dale Sveum was a 4-Piniella manager for having neck veins that flared up like a Jurassic Park Dilophosaurus. Mike Quade's Piniella reading is unavailable-- umpires could not figure out how angry he was because he has no eyebrows).

-Carlos Villanueva is still on the team and last year he had a spectacular curl mustache. Maybe this year, he'll grow some nineteenth century presidential muttonchops.

-Jeff Samardzija still looks like a musketeer, and will probably blame his poor outings on the machinations of Cardinal Richelieu. My prediction is that the Cubs will trade him before the deadline and then he ends up pitching a crucial playoff game against the Hypothetical Future Cubs, only this time he has gotten a sensible haircut and shave just when it would have had finally made sense for him to be sporting Early Modern Vengeance Facial Hair specifically to confound me.

-There are 162 games in a baseball season and regular players will earn north of 500 plate appearances. At some point, it is probable that Starlin Castro will earn a walk or Darwin Barney will hit a baseball with his bat. No guarantees, though, fans.

-Len Casper will attempt to pretend that a shitty Cubs player is turning things around, while in his heart, he knows the sample size is small, the statistic is misleading, and a Ricketts is holding a binder full of spreadsheets hostage at Cubs headquarters.

-Why the watch the goddamn Cubs any year?

-Fuck it dude, let's go bowling.

Cubs fans, we're stuck rooting for this team until the Terror Squirrel takes us to hell

Northwestern football has been in the news lately, and it's not because of lofty expectations for next year or a dashing transfer, or a tragic Pat Fitzgerald fist pump injury, or because the football team is no longer training with Navy SEALs and instead is being chased around downtown Evanston by graduate assistants dressed like mummies. Kain Colter has taken the case for the unionization of Northwestern football players to the National Labor Relations Board. They have won the ruling. Northwestern athletes may have fired a salvo into the NCAA's confusing "student-athlete" designation.

It is somewhat surreal seeing Kain Colter's face all over sports websites. We knew Colter's versatility allowed him to play quarterback, wide receiver, running back, backup quarterback, long snapper, dropkick specialist, wedge-buster, graduate assistant, sports information director, and United States Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs during his illustrious football career. Now, he has become the face of the national debate about big money college athletics. Northwestern is currently at the epicenter of the college football universe.

What does this all mean?

Disclaimer: BYCTOM could not be more qualified to discuss this issue. Its team of analysts and legal researchers are experts affiliated with the Hollywood Upstairs Institute of Internet Football Law, and all readers are encouraged to use the analysis contained herein to make internet arguments and crucial decisions about their families' financial future.

BYCTOM specializes in Internet Football Law, mustache injury, leech
malpractice, bear-baiting law, treason against fictional nations, treason in
the name of fictional nations, railroad vengeance, and Canadian constitutional
crises involving the Governor-General

WHAT IS AT THE HEART OF THE CASE

The case centers on the NCAA's designation of student-athletes. The NCAA clings to the idea that football players are college students who study, hang out on the quad, and occasionally go out and get run over by 280 pound behemoths. NCAA officials argue that athletes are rewarded with scholarships (becoming more valuable as the cost of tuition skyrockets) and other amenities. It's as if you and me and some other fellows were walking around in our Northwestern varsity jackets and saw some other fellows wearing Illini orange and said perhaps we should participate in a sporting contest for the honor of the ol' alma mater, what say you chaps and then played a football match in a local field surrounded by tens of thousands of well-wishers and a staggering number of people on TV and were also screamed at by crew-cutted millionaires in khaki slacks.

With all of this money floating around, the NCAA has to keep its eyes open to attempts to stain the purity of the sport. Therefore, the organization has a byzantine rulebook governing the relationship between athletes and potential corrupting influences such as coaches, boosters, and the roguish Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg. This is particularly intricate during recruiting, when high school football stars are vulnerable to all kinds of creative inducement from outright bribery to patronage to the threat of having to sit into a room with Nick Saban for hours. More recently, potential recruits can also be yelled at by assorted yahoos on social media who are incensed that they discarded their team's hat in an overly cavalier manner. Recruiting is an absurd tug of war between NCAA attempts to regulate contact with recruits as programs and boosters find ways to circumvent and ignore these rules. This is good news for those of us who are disappointed that the twenty-first century is devoid of the type of intrigue and betrayal you'd find in medieval betrothal politics, where a coach might try to cement his interest in a player by recruiting a less talented friend or hiring a high school coach or destabilizing the Principality of Grubenslagen and installing a puppet ruler who coincidentally looks exactly like the Prince.

You, happy Austria, recruit a fullback

The Northwestern players argue that they are actually employees of the school as a crucial part of a multi-million dollar sporting enterprise that depends on them to run. They claim that football demands hours of practice and preparation that have more in common with a full-time job than a part-time sport. They want to be able to collectively bargain with the university.

NORTHWESTERN IS SORT OF A WEIRD FLASHPOINT FOR ALL OF THIS

In many ways, Northwestern is about as close as it gets to the NCAA's model for a college football program in a major conference. Northwestern players are held to higher academic standards than most other FBS schools. Nearly all of them graduate. Scholarships are worth more because of Northwestern's soaring tuition rates. This is not a football factory, and for many years, it was unable to determine whether the Wildcats' football stadium was an elaborate art installation about futility led by unusually large performance artists.

Yet, the Northwestern unionization effort demonstrates that the pressures of football fall upon all players equally. Northwestern emphasizes its academics and graduation rate as part of its overall football brand, as integral to the identity of Northwestern football as other aspects such as empty, tarp-riddled stands and dubious claims to loyalty of indifferent Chicagoland sports fans. Colter, on the other hand, testified that he was discouraged from taking classes that conflicted with practices during the season and reinforced the tremendous time commitments demanded by football. I can identify with those pressures as a college student since I also had hours away from my studies dedicated to day games at Wrigley Field, leading the virtual Chicago Bears to numerous Madden NFL championships, and watching reruns of the Highlander television show where the Highlander lived on a houseboat, wielded a katana, and Roger Daltrey had a mustache.

Television Highlander Adrian Paul contemplates past head
choppings and head choppings to come

WHAT DOES THE RULING MEAN

The ruling means that the National Labor Relations Board agrees that scholarship football players (but not walk-ons) are university employees and can vote to join the College Athletes Players Association. If formed, this union can collectively bargain with the university. The players are not immediately seeking direct payment, but the creation of a trust fund for athletes, guaranteed medical care for current and former players, and more control over transfers to other schools. The ruling currently applies only to private universities.

Northwestern is appealing the decision to the NLRB in Washington. NCAA President Mark Emmert claims the case will ultimately end up in the Supreme Court. Regardless of outcome, the ruling has greatly upset the NCAA apple cart and dealt another blow to the bizarre marriage of universities to billion-dollar sporting concerns. It seems clear that, in the near future, the model of college athletics will have to adjust in order to compensate athletes in big revenue sports or change into something else altogether.

What type of action could players use as leverage? Should the CAPA form, how far would they and their representatives push for compensation? Could there be a strike?

A BRIEF SUMMARY OF "THE PICKET LINEMEN," A TERRIBLE HYPOTHETICAL COLLEGE FOOTBALL STRIKE MOVIE WRITTEN BY MARK EMMERT

In the year 2020, the United States Supreme Court has made it legal for college football teams to unionize. Players demand payment in money, flashy cars, and gilded pantaloons while burning textbooks on their stadiums' 50 yard lines. The American people are outraged, but helpless in the face of this reign of terror because of the government.

Lance Stryker, the President of College Football looks on with consternation. He expects a delegation from the College Football Union to bring their list of extravagant demands. Stryker's secretary tells them to have a seat, but they march past her and burst into Stryker's office. The head of the union, Trench Bludgeoner, wears a fancy suit, carries a gold-tipped cane, and polishes a monocle that was surely and inappropriately given to him by a booster. His right-hand man is a tough guy named Bill Flint played by Steven Seagal who waddles into the office and regards all parties menacingly. Bludegeoner removes a list of College Football's concessions to the players that includes a reasonable stipend and a free education from a stainless steel briefcase and burns them on Stryker's desk. The players' demands include payment in canvas sacks with dollar signs on them. "I don't know if they even make these sacks," Stryker says. "Then make them yourself," sneers Bludgeoner. "We're on strike." Bludgeoner leaves the office, flourishing his cape.

Flint leans into Stryker. "Don't even try to break this strike," he says in a growling half-whisper. "Or I'll break your organization, your fancy desk, and your bones." Actually he has to write that last part down on a whiteboard because his whisper has gotten too quiet by the end of his threat, and while he's at it, he draws a quick caricature of his own scowling face to let Stryker know he means business. On his way out, he headbutts two College Football officials in the lobby.

The strike is disastrous. Stadiums sit empty. Mascots desperately prowl campuses, accosting unsuspecting students with antics. A trombone plays, sadly. Soon, stadiums become the sites of violence as fans demand football action. In Wisconsin, a riot leaves thousands of bratwursts trampled. Stryker remains resolute, but the government gets involved and forces College Football to pay the players. Within a week, a fleet of trucks with billions of dollars in gold and canvas sacks stands at the ready to distribute.

But then Stryker realizes that Bludgeoner, Flint, and the union are not going to distribute the money to the players after all. He enlists the Head of University Computers to dig into the records and enhance a lot of photos. They discover that Trench Bludgeoner is not a college football player at all. He's the head of The Organization, an international outfit responsible for 75% of the world's heinous crimes involving transporting counterfeit money hidden in illegal guns made out of narcotics on illegal whaling vessels. This information is shown on a pie chart. Also, Bludgeoner has secretly been behind every recruiting infraction for the past twenty years, someone that Stryker has known only from the monogrammed handkerchief he leaves at hat ceremonies as his calling card to let Stryker know that he has successfully corrupted a players' recruitment. Stryker is infuriated and punches through a plate glass window while shouting in slow motion. We see a montage of him putting on tactical suspenders, holstering a stapler, and swapping his reading glasses for bifocals. This is one violation that can't be self-reported.

Stryker knows he is the only person who can stop Bludgeoner from stealing College Football's gold and using it to invest in an unprecedented criminal infrastructure. He takes out the lead truck driver and leads the fleet into an abandoned factory. But Flint is waiting for him, and attacks with dozens of slow-moving aikdo maneuvers. Flint is about to strike the killing blow on a bloodied Stryker when Purdue Pete drives a train into his chest. Bludgeoner escapes, but without the money. College football resumes with a lucrative post-season tournament. But after the credits roll, Stryker turns on the news to see that youth soccer players are attempting to organize in Peru. He tightens his suspenders, grabs his briefcase, and looks directly into the camera with steely determination.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR NORTHWESTERN FOOTBALL

The possibility of union action has left a rift between the university and the players. Pat Fitzgerald testified on behalf of Northwestern.

The hearings have been hell on Fitzgerald, who is forced to spend time in a
buttoned-down hearing where fist pumps are discouraged, steering gestures
questioned, and all manner of butt bumps banned

Meanwhile, spring football looms as players prepare for the upcoming season. The 'Cats are already trying to rebound from a disastrous season where preseason hype for a possible LEGENDS DIVISION title fell apart in a series of unfathomable last-second defeats. We have no way of knowing how the unionization battle will affect the Wildcats on the field,but it may somehow stand in the way of Northwestern winning a BCS championship.

In April, Northwestern football players voted on unionization. The results, however, won't be known for awhile. They will be revealed after the federal NLRB rules on the NCAA's appeal to overturn the landmark decision that allowed Northwestern athletes to be classified as university employees. That means it will be several months before the union forms or we see an excessive celebration from Mark Emmert.

A classless display by Emmert. In my day, NCAA presidents would simply hand their legal briefs
to their legal team and act like they've continued the baffling marriage of a mutli-billion dollar
minor-league sports apparatus to a university system before

What does this mean for Northwestern moving forward?

Disclaimer: BYCTOM is a legal expert on all matters of Internet Football Law. Our legal team has been hunkered in a closed concrete bunker for the past several months receiving legal documents through a pneumatic tube system to explore every possible precedent for legal action in this case. Do not trust other websites or so-called legal experts to explain any part of this situation to you. There is no more trusted, accurate analysis of the Northwestern union situation on the entire internet than a blogspot website called "Bring Your Champions, They're Our Meat," and you should expect to see this post mentioned in legal citations for generations. BYCTOM also specializes in horse-law and shipwreck treasure arbitration.

This image would theoretically get old in a blog that updates more than
once every several months

THE BACKLASH

While Kain Colter, College Athletes Players Association, and others have been encouraging unionization, the efforts have not been popular with other Wildcats. Quarterback Trevor Siemian opposed the measure, stating that he was satisfied with his treatment at Northwestern. This was troubling since he and Colter combined into a theoretically unstoppable passing/running multifaceted quarterback threat for the past two seasons, and I assumed that the Cats' unorthodox sleep studies and training with Navy SEALs were experiments designed to link the two signal-callers' brains like the robot operators in Pacific Rim. Other players have suggested that the union fight is a distraction. The case certainly drew far more attention to Northwestern athletics in the spring at a time when the basketball team traditionally eliminates itself from the NCAA tournament and everyone forgets that Northwestern football exists.

Certainly Northwestern's administration did all that it could to dissuade football players from unionizing. Coach Fitz has found himself in a strange position. He has depicted himself as an earnest, crew-cutted boy scout troop leader, selling Northwestern's academic bona fides. When Colter began to publicly ally support unionization by stenciling references to the "All Players United" slogan on his wristbands, Fitzgerald publicly supported the gesture while disagreeing with the message. But, with a looming unionization vote, Fitz has lined up squarely behind the university. He has sent out messages to, in his words, "educate" players and their families about the university's fears against unionization.

Union supporters fear that the fist pumps of encouragement may turn into the
Pinkertons' cudgels

Regardless of the results, union activism has made some impression. Athletic Director Jim Phillips has recently argued that athletes should have voting voice in major issues that concern them. He opposes a union, however, because he, Northwestern, and the NCAA do not believe that athletes are employees. Phillips, like Fitzgerald, claims that schools should act in the best interests of athletes without the involvement of a union. Union activists counter that schools will continue to pay lip service to changing conditions unless an organization representing players can apply pressure and bargain collectively.

The central problem is that the link between a massive minor league football apparatus and universities makes absolutely no sense. Our national love affair with watching organized people smash into each other, mixed with regional pride, mixed with college students holding up signs and the pompous pronouncements of television personalities, and combined with people willing to call into Paul Finebaum's show and yell at each other like professional wrestlers for my amusement, is grafted onto an already unwieldy educational complex. It seems unlikely that the NCAA can continue to hold this all together. It is impossible to endorse the status quo, where enormous piles of money make their way to universities, the NCAA, conferences, and other college sports-adjacent organizations while the young people who smash into each other are governed by an elaborate set of rules designed to prevent them from capitalizing on their smashing while Ed Orgeron is allowed to use his football notoriety in order to convince people to pay him to talk in public.

COLLEGE ATHLETICS

College athletics, especially in the big revenue sports, is inherently absurd, corrupt, unfair, and hypocritical. Northwestern's unionization efforts have contributed to the increasingly loud outcry against the NCAA. Northwestern, which has tended to position itself as a model program that graduates nearly all of its athletes and insists on higher academic standards for recruits, now stands as a citadel against athletic unionization and for the untenable status quo. It's certainly not news that that college sports are rife with contradictions or that the NCAA's defense of amateur athletics rings hollow. This has been true since college sports existed. But it is odd to see Northwestern at the front lines of organization efforts. It's hard to celebrate college football while the NCAA and others taking a share of monstrous college sports profits comport themselves with the fiscal integrity of a nineteenth-century political machine.

The Bowl Championship Series, for example, made waves by
pocketing millions from universities and dodging taxes by operating
as charitable organizations while paying half-million dollar salaries to
bowl executives. The 2007 Fiesta Bowl even featured allegations
of reimbursing employees for campaign contributions, which I enjoyed
because it's as if the Fiesta Bowl executives were making a list of ridiculously
unethical things to do with the windfall from college football games while
staging some sort of boring executive bacchanal when someone said wait we
haven't figured out a way to also make illegal campaign contributions yet and
then a bunch of balloons fell from the ceiling while Kool and the Gang blared
from the speakers and then they all started betting on toddler fighting or
something equally awful just because they can

The reason why all of this money is at stake is because college football is spectacular. I love Northwestern football. I can't wait for next season. I hope Northwestern's football people smash the crap out of lesser football people. I want to hear the fight song when Venric Mark zooms past a bunch of hapless linebackers. I want Northwestern to anger a bunch of people from Iowa. I want to root for the Wildcats to take the Former Legends Division while being conflicted that the Big Ten has sane, cardinal-direction based divisions and I can't make fun of the LEGENDS DIVISION anymore. Most importantly, I want to continue to support Northwestern athletics for the sole purpose of frustrating the designs of Tim Beckman, who made the grave error of trying to respect Northwestern as a rival and has thus fated himself to be ground into dust by the state's slightly less miserable conference rival.

Captain Beck Man spends another season in pursuit of his Purple Whale

NEXT SEASON OUTLOOK

Kain Colter, the face of college football unionization, has graduated. He will attempt to catch on with the Minnesota Vikings along with Tyler Scott. Both hope to join Corey Wootton, who signed with the Vikes as a free agent because the Minnesota Vikings have apparently hired me as a general manager to build the team the way I used to load all of my Madden teams with Wildcats.

Madden 05 was the last copy I owned, but it had a bunch of NU guys and the "hit stick" feature,
which let you launch horrifyingly illegal headhunting tackles that would get you fined in the modern
NFL, but let you gleefully injure Digital Brett Favre, one of the greatest villains in the history of
video games alongside Bowser, Soda Popkinski, and those dumb birds from Ninja Gaiden that knocked
you into the game's seemingly endless array of bottomless pits

Colter's work with CAPA has deservedly taken the lion's share of attention, but the Wildcats will miss him on the field as well. Kain Colter was probably the most fun player Northwestern has had. He lined up all over the field, but as quarterback he was more effective as a runner than a passer. On third and long, over and over again, he took the snap and scampered past a helpless defense that had to know what was happening but was unable to stop it. When Mark was healthy, they formed the most exciting option attack Northwestern had ever fielded. He came off the bench to hit Ebert with a strike that went 81 yards to help upset Nebraska in Lincoln in one of the most memorable wins of the Colter era. And, he clearly got that fourth down against Ohio State, regardless of what the corporate ESPN mainstream media want you to believe.

It's all very clear if you just look at the video evidence

Northwestern's outlook for the season is unclear. The 'Cats lost Colter and a number of other talented seniors, but they will return Venric Mark and the core of an improving defense. It is also unlikely that they will suffer from the horror of last year's impossible season when they lost game after game on plays that only happen at the end of sports movies. Historically, the 'Cats have not performed well lately with preseason top-25 rankings and expectations, and will have the luxury of letting the season grow into what it will.

No matter what happens on the field, the unionization issue will continue to hover over the program. We're all looking forward to the Wildcats feeling their way into a new Big Ten landscape brought about by another wave of ridiculous and byzantine conference realignment. I look forward to developing an enmity towards Rutgers and Maryland when it comes time to actually play them. I look forward to Sonny Dykes swearing revenge after accusing the 'Cats of faking injuries without the panache of their face-clutching basketball and soccer-playing compatriots. And, most importantly, I look forward to a version of college athletics where players have an opportunity to challenge the NCAA and universities in order to gain fair compensation for totally wrecking an opposing quarterback.

After years of conference skullduggery, the day Big Ten fans have dreamed about is here. Maryland and Rutgers have joined the Big Ten, bloating it up to 14 teams and hundreds of possible teams. For those of you who haven't been diligently following, printing, and annotating the blogspot Northwestern football blog Bring Your Champions, They're Our Meat posts for the past several years, this is a positive step in the direction of the creation of the Enormous Ten, an all-encompassing college sports conference that involves every single team in the country with the possible exception of Purdue. The Enormous Ten football season will play out with a series of regional Tournaments of Roses, eventually culminating in a Big Ten Champion of Champions ladder that involve prestigious Big Ten bowls such as the Rose Bowl, the Alamo Bowl, the Motor City Bowl, and the Big Ten Championship Super Bowl Bowl played at a newly-built luxury sports facility at the exact geographical center of the continental United States, which will be the Big Ten's remit.

The Big Ten extends its manifest destiny as it moves east, west, north, south, and a multitude
of other directions

For football, Maryland and Rutgers will be placed in the Big Ten East, and neither will play Northwestern next season. It is, however, important to assimilate them into the Big Ten culture as quickly as possible. Spearheading this effort will be Illinois football coach Tim "Beck" Man, who will also be serving as the inaugural Big Ten Director of Rivalry and Mutual Antagonism. Here are some leaked documents obtained by BYCTOM contacts in the Illinois athletic department detailing how Beckman plans to welcome Rutgers and Maryland to the greatest athletic conference in the midwest and some parts of the northeast.

EXCLUSIVE LEAKED BECK MAN COMMUNIQUES

The following is a transcript of a series of recordings of conversations held in Tim Beckman's Anti-Wildcat Command Center in an underground bunker underneath Memorial Stadium in Champaign, Illinois. Voices identified as Jim Delany, Tim Beckman, and an unidentified Illini assistant.

Monday, March 10, 2014, 7:51 AM

DELANY: ...like legends and leaders but with more attitude, you know, like in those doritos commercials. Like the upstanding young person division but with those rap songs where people announce who they are and what they're going to say.
BECKMAN: [to unknown] I SAID NO PURPLE IN HERE YOU TELL THEM I'M NOT GOING TO PAY FOR THAT DIMETAPP DISPLAY THIS IS ILLINI COUNTRY. What was that? Legends? Leaders? I get paid to win ball games x 22 rocket right burn evanston hut.
DELANY: Coach as you know, we have two more top-flight educational institutions in the lucrative East Coast television market and the problem is no one here hates them or knows anything about them. We need you to do what you do best: ban their logos, headbutt photos of their mascots, spit chewing tobacco all over their flags. Something, leaderous. Legendary. [whooshing noise]
UNKNOWN VOICE #1: Your cape just got caught in that smoldering wreckage of Ryan Field model
BECKMAN: I've got no time for those schools out east. Is one of them Youngstown State? Because next game is Youngstown State. You know, Toledo lost to those guys in 1961, and I've been going to zoos and roughing up people in Penguin costumes
DELANY: No, you unhook it at the front, it's held together by that Big Ten Legend Juan Dixon pin
BECKMAN: And the Burgess Meredith people don't understand college football at all and that's why he

[18 minutes of silence]

DELANY: ...but what if we call them the LEASTDERS and the WESTGENDS, I said to the guy I was just spitballing but we're paying you thousands and I just came up with that in five minutes, you know?
BECKMAN: So it's Maryland? Maryland's easy. What's in Maryland? Crabcakes? I'm going to have an assistant fly out there and bring back a crate full of crabcakes and I'm going to stomp them one by one while dressed as...what's their mascot?
UNKNOWN VOICE: The terrapins.
BECKMAN: Is that some sort of wild cat?
UNKNOWN VOICE: It's a turtle
BECKMAN: A turtle? Ok, I'm going to stomp on on a bunch of crabcakes while pretending to be controlled by a floating anthropomorphic brain in a gigantic belt. Done. What's the other one?
DELANY: Rutgers, a fine educational institution with generations of Big Ten tradition.
BECKMAN: Is that a small, private university? [suspiciously] Are they purple?
DELANY: They're a state university, and they're scarlet knights.
BECKMAN: Ok, I'm going to joust a guy and rip a flag from, where the hell is Rutgers? Michigan? Ohio? Kentuckey?
DELANY: Jersey
BECKMAN: Jesus Christ.

Intercepted E-mail from Tim Beckman to Jim Delany

Monday, March 10, 11:26 AM
From: r.zook@illinois.edu
To: legendleader14@b1g.org

i am going to win bon jovi's house and im going to burn it

tbman

THE NBA IS A VIPER'S NEST OF INTRIGUE AND INNUENDO

Carmelo Anthony is a free agent. So is LeBron James. And so are dozens of other of NBA stars, semi-stars, role players, guys who come in for five minutes and elbow people, and Drew Crawford. Teams like the Bulls and Rockets have been pulling out all the stops, lining their stadiums with Pro-Carmelo propaganda like he has just successfully pulled off a coup d'etat

And at that point Melo knew he loved the Houston Rockets

The NBA's byzantine salary cap has made it extremely difficult to determine whether or not the Bulls can afford to pay him and retain key pieces such as Taj Gibson, Jimmy Butler, the rights to Nikola Mirotic, the crown of Spanish Poneramia, and one of Stacey King's old gym socks. The Miami Heat are involved in a convoluted dance to re-sign their Big Three at enough of a discount to add another player who does not spend his time between playoff games in a sarcophagus. Meanwhile, we can all agree that this convoluted player movement is all for naught unless we can get Dwight Gooden one step closer to playing for every team in the Association.

But the most entertaining intrigue this off-season has been with coaches and executives. Former point guards have been taking advantage of an NBA pilot program to send former players with no coaching experience directly into head coaching positions and somehow this has resulted in bizarre power plays. Mark Jackson departed Golden State amid allegations of a falling-out with assistant Brian Scalabrine, which would be an incredibly funny development to someone in 2005. The Warriors then hired Steve Kerr who had been a general manager and now only needs to become a majority owner in order win some sort of NBA job decathlon. And Jason Kidd, hired months after his retirement, has somehow forced his way out of Brooklyn through a series of attempted power grabs in order to take the reins in Milwaukee. Kidd's major accomplishments were coaching Brooklyn into the playoffs in an abysmal Eastern conference, tactically spilling a courtside beverage, decisively exiling his rival Lawrence Frank to an abandoned film room, and growing a beard that makes him look like the villain in one of those Iron Man movies. Usually, this is the place in BYCTOM where I would compare all of this to some sort of early modern Holy Roman Empire situation, but a treacherous Duke was allowed time to scheme in private and not have to deal with twitter rumor-mongering, the NBA salary cap, transnational Russian nickel-mining concerns, and the trauma of having been dunked upon in the recent past. Thank goodness for professional sports.

A Stovepipe Showdown

Bowl Game Part V

It Has Been Zero Years since Northwestern Last Won a Bowl Game

Northwestern Basketball Coaching Search

A Football Is Coming

Football Season is Here

BYCTOM Grainy Video Footage Edition

The Least Northwestern of Games

Remember the Maine

FOOTBALL APOCALYPSE. BE ALARMED.

Northwestern Football Post-Apocalypse

Flew Too Close to the Sun, On Wings of Pastrami

Good Gravy

You Maniacs

Haturn Devouring His Hat

Old Hat

Hope is Snake Oil: The 2014 Chicago Cubs

So Your Football Team Can Theoretically Unionize

So Your Football Team May or May Not Have Theoretically Unionized

Big Ten Expandomania